Some gray areas still hover over the pension reform. Indeed, if we now know how the government would like to proceed to pass this reform, we will probably have to wait until January to find out all the details.
One of these gray areas concerns long careers. Currently, this system allows people who started working before the age of 20 to retire earlier. While the legal retirement age is currently 62, employees affected by early retirement may cease their activity at age 58 at the earliest. For this, however, you must have started working at the age of 16.
The government has not yet set the precise rules concerning this point of the reform. However, given that the legal retirement age should be raised to 65, it would not be illogical for the retirement age for long careers to also be raised by a few years.
On October 26, 2022, during his interview on the set of France 2, Emmanuel Macron was also in this direction. “We have to negotiate it. We have to keep a mechanism where, of course, they will be asked to work a little longer, but we have to define the right threshold,” he explained. He then added that “we can’t stay at 60, but we will ask them to go to 63, 64, 65. There too, we have to make it fair”.
Thus, it will still be necessary to be patient for the people who could be affected by an early departure. But what is certain is that this point risks being divisive when the debates.
“For us, it would be a double penalty because those who started working early must be able to leave when they have the number of quarters necessary to have the full rate,” said Pascale Coton, vice-president of the CFTC union, interviewed by Capital. .
Conversely, for the employers’ unions, a “grooming” would be necessary for this device. “We must review this question and link the long career system to trades that are physically exposed,” said Eric Chevée, member of the Confederation of Small and Medium Enterprises (CPME), to our colleagues.
But, in addition to long careers, the pension reform could also tackle another device which could affect the amount of retirement pensions received by people who have benefited from a long career.
To benefit from the long career scheme, you must have a sufficient number of contribution quarters. However, certain assimilated quarters may also be taken into account.
However, as Climb reports, this possibility will be removed by the pension reform. Thus, it will be necessary to justify a greater number of validated quarters given that those acquired free of charge will no longer be counted. Thus, the long career system should not be abolished by the reform but could, on the other hand, undergo significant modifications.