“We have to work harder,” Emmanuel Macron told the French in his last speech at the end of the year. And the French went to war.
When the President of the Republic asked to work more, he was referring to raising the retirement age from the current 62 to 64. It is the most important measure and the most controversial of the pension reform debated this week in the National Assembly. But the phrase implied harsh judgment: the French work little or not as much as they should.
The French responded to the President’s request with a resounding “No”. On January 19 and 31, more than a million people across the country took to the streets against the reform. Demonstrations are being called for February 7th and 11th.
On a hand-painted poster in Paris last March, a pack of cigarettes was drawn with the words “Malbarré” instead of the famous brand. Something like “We’re going wrong.” Below it was written: “Work kills”. Slogans like this take up a widespread claim: more free time. And a torment: that late retirement shortens the golden years before disease and extinction.
Hostility to work has a long tradition in France. Paul Lafargue, in his famous 1880 treatise The Right to Laziness, denounced “the madness which represents the love of work, the dying passion for work carried to the exhaustion of the vital energies of the individual and his descendants”. “. A century and a half later, environmentalist Sandrine Rousseau is leading a sector of the left that is reclaiming the “right to be lazy” and resisting working more under the banner of a more balanced and free life.
“Are the French just lazy?” asks historian Robert Zaretsky in the New York Times. In an episode of Emily in Paris, the Netflix soap opera about an American in Paris, which has many themes related to both countries, the following dialogue can be heard between the protagonist Emily and Luc, a fellow Parisian.
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Luc: I think you Americans are doing it wrong. you live to work We work to live. It’s okay to make money, but what you call success, I call punishment.
Emily: But I enjoy the work (…) and it makes me happy.
Luc: Does work make you happy?
The dialogue summarizes with a broad brushstroke what experts have analyzed: the peculiar relationship of the French to work. Although annual working time in France fell between 1975 and 2003, it has since stabilized. In terms of hours worked, it is above Germany but below Spain and the OECD average.
At the same time, this is the country that introduced the 35-hour week in 1998, although it has since been relaxed. It is also one of the neighboring countries with the lowest retirement age at 62 years. If the reform is finally adopted, it would still be 64, although in France 43 years of contributions are required to receive the full pension (in Spain the age will be raised to 67 in 2027 and 65 for those who have paid in over 38 years and half).
“There is a labor crisis in France,” explains sociologist Dominique Méda, author of El trabajo. A vanishing value? “The French are among the Europeans who attach the most importance to work, but they are also among those who are most disappointed, especially because of the poor working conditions.”
Méda, director of the institute for interdisciplinary research in the social sciences at the University of Paris-Dauphine, points to European surveys that show these poor conditions compared to neighbors like Germany. 43% of French workers have to move heavy loads, 57% work in tiring or painful positions, only 45% feel well paid.
‘The French obviously expect a good income from work, but they also want it to be interesting, have a good atmosphere and be useful,’ says Professor Méda. “At the same time, the conditions are mediocre and the recognition weak: they complain of contempt or are treated like playthings by a management based on diplomas and coded goals. They complain about the workload, the lack of troops.”
The French government has opened a reflection on improving working conditions. And it launched ideas like the four-day week. The discomfort is there. In 1990, 60% of French people said that work was “very important” in their life; According to a survey by the Ifop Institute, it is now 24%. Another survey by the same institute concluded that the French are suffering from “an epidemic of laziness” after the pandemic: 30% feel “less motivated”. “It is evidence of a real movement in society, anticipating the appetite for a different rhythm of life,” psychiatrist Stéphane Clerget told the Ouest-France newspaper.
In fact, according to economist Bertrand Martinot, the French have an ambivalent relationship to work, just as they have to the idea of happiness. “If you ask them how the world is, they’ll tell you it’s catastrophic,” he explains. “But if you ask her: What about you? The French will say, “Good”. That is, individual happiness, public misfortune. The same thing happens with work: if you ask how the world of work is, they will tell you that it is terrible, that there is exploitation, that they hate capitalism… But if you ask them specifically about their work, they will say it’s going well, the manager trust me, I manage to balance my personal and professional life…”
Martinot is the author of The French at Work, a study published this week by think tank Institut Montaigne, based on a survey of 5,000 active people in France. 77% report job satisfaction, a stable level since before the pandemic. “Nevertheless, we have to go into detail,” says Martinot. “And there are sources of dissatisfaction that are not new: remuneration, a lack of recognition on the job and a lack of career prospects.” A new reason for dissatisfaction after the pandemic is teleworking: half of wage earners want more opportunities to do it.
All of this alone does not explain the reason for such a broad, cross-class and cross-class opposition to pension reform that is unparalleled in other countries: seven out of ten French people oppose Macron’s plan. One explanation is that retirement has become a symbol of the French social model. But there is something else. Raising the retirement age to 64 – after raising it from 60 to 62 in 2010 – touches on the essentials: life, aging, illness, death. And it affects everyone. It’s an existential matter.
“Retirement has symbolic value as a balance for all of life’s difficulties: ‘Life is difficult, but we have the pension,'” summarizes the veteran sociologist Dominique Schnapper. “And add that you are against the government in whatever it is doing. If you combine both, we come to the current situation.”
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