General strike in France is fresh test for Emmanuel Macron

President Emmanuel Macron is facing his biggest test since the “Yellow Vest” uprising shook his presidency a year ago, as unions representing railway and transport workers and many others in the public sector called for a walkout on Thursday to protest changes to France’s uniquely generous pension system.

The strike began to unfold Wednesday evening as workers at the national railway SNCF walked off the job. The walkout threatens to paralyse France for several days or more, with teachers, students, hospital staff, police officers, garbage collectors, truck drivers and airline workers all expected to join.

By Wednesday night, the streets of Paris were uncharacteristically quiet, with people wary of being caught without transportation options home. Parts of the Paris subway system had come to a halt, and buses had signs in their windows that they were returning to their depots.

The fresh round of social unrest is once again calling into question Macron’s top-down management style, a big factor in last year’s protest over stagnating wages and dwindling living standards. He promised then to bring more voices into his decision-making but has wound up dictating another overhaul that has created deep unease in France.

There is also now concern at the top at the reaction from the street, with one senior official at the Élysée Palace, the French presidency, acknowledging that the pension overhaul had the potential to galvanise disparate parts of the opposition. “Pension reforms create anxiety. It’s not an easy sell,” said the official, who could only be quoted anonymously under French rules.

The Yellow Vests say they will join the new protest — unlike the unions, they have been successful at extracting concessions from the government — as will Macron’s opponents, right and left, and a wide spectrum of unions, though not the centrist French Democratic Confederation of Labor.

Publicly, government officials have been busy assuring journalists and others that they are not afraid of the strike action, which has come to be called “the Dec. 5 wall.” But the walkout and the underlying social discontent call into question Macron’s apparent triumph over the Yellow Vest movement, seen up until now as a crucial moment of his reformist presidency. Unions are predicting a huge turnout on Thursday.

Jean Garrigues, a political historian at the University of Orléans, said, “The victory doesn’t seem to have rehabilitated Macron.” This week’s protest is “the reflection of a crisis in French society, one that can explode at any moment,” he added. “There’s real anxiety over the future.”

Macron’s hasty $19 billion check to bolster purchasing power in the form of tax cuts and income supplements for low earners did help tamp down the Yellow Vest demonstrations.

But some analysts, like economist Daniel Cohen of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, have pointed out that the cash did not settle underlying French social dislocation linked to globalisation. The senior Élysée official acknowledged that citizens were in effect saying that they had not seen enough improvement to their daily lives.

The strike has been called to protest Macron’s proposed overhaul of the Byzantine French pension system, one of the world’s most complicated and generous, which is currently headed for a deficit of about $19 billion. Some railway workers, for instance, can retire at 52, and average retirement ages are among the lowest in the industrialised world.

The official retirement age is 62, but many retire before. Pensions as a percentage of working-age salaries are among the world’s highest, hovering at around 70%, and often even higher for state workers. Retirements tend to be long in France, and public leisure facilities — concerts, museums, theatres — are often full of vigorous retirees with lots of time on their hands.

The results of this complex system of 42 different pension plans are remarkable: France has among the world’s lowest old-age poverty rates, and average incomes of those over 65 are slightly higher than incomes under that age, a global rarity.

The train workers have their own retirement plan, as do the opera workers, the workers at the Comédie-Française — the national theatre company — and the workers at the Port of Bordeaux, among others. Most workers are under the private-sector pension plan, in which the state is also heavily involved.

The French are fiercely protective of their world-beating pension arrangements, and indeed, the government does not dare tinker with the basics: It is not proposing to spend less on pensions or to make people retire later.

Instead, Macron’s idea is to merge all these disparate systems, public and private, into one state-managed system in which workers accumulate points over the course of a working life and then cash them in.

His instinct is always to rationalise and he says his system will be fairer, though there are concerns that his changes will mean less for some.

Hervé Boulhol, a pensions specialist at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that, as things stand, “We’ve got a panorama that’s extremely disparate, with lots of different rules.” Macron is proposing “a very ambitious reform,” Boulhol said. “We’re changing the way of calculating pension rights.”

But although many in France worship the rational, it is also a country that loves street protest and hates change, particularly in a moment full of fear over globalisation and climate change. Previous governments have foundered on the third rail of French politics, the pensions system.

“It’s not right that you do the same work, and your neighbour retires earlier, the calculation is different,” Macron said at a public meeting in Rodez in central France this fall. “So this has created suspicion in regard to our pension system, so today people find that it is more or less unfair, and more and more, people have doubts about it.”

But they appear to have even more doubts about Macron’s changes. “The amount of pension, for everybody, is going to go down,” said Benoît Martin, a senior official with the General Confederation of Labor, a left-leaning union that is leading the charge on Thursday. He added, “The number of retirees is going to go up, but they’re not talking about spending more on pensions.”

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