On Friday, March 24, 2023 at 11:48:14 AM UTC+11, Dan Koren wrote:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65057249
Melmoth, please report!
dk
When I started to brush up my French, back in the 1990s when both my offspring had left home and I had more time for such things, exactly the same kind of agitation was going on about exactly the same issue, only the man held to blame was not the
president (Jacques Chirac) but the Prime Minister (Alain Jupp'e). Jupp'e was prepared to take a stand and face the music, but Chirac gave way and called a general election: the result was the famous 'cohabitation' where the president was a member of one
political party (RMP? - now Les Republicains?) and the new Prime Minister and his cabinet were members of another (Parti Socialiste). In the end, the state pension was unchanged. You are eligible at age 61 generally, but train drivers can retire at 55,
and I imagine other occupational groups similarly enjoy equally generous terms. The problem is, the taxpayer has to fund these pensions, and the French government has decided that the system is unaffordable as it stand, and so it has passed, by
presidential decree, a law that has raised the pensionable age to 64. This is hardly onerous: in Australia you do not get the state pension until you are 65. Many of us, including myself, do not draw the state pension but are 'self-funded by a
superannuation schene to which both employer and employee contribute: when you retire you have the choice of a lump sum, a pension, or a combination of both. I retired with a lump sum and a pension at the age of 67. I'd have considered 61 far too early,
but then, unlike Parisians, I didn't have to endure metro-boulot-dodo (subway train-work-sleep) as an exhausting way of life.
Anyway, the French trade union organisations - there are more than one of them - have, predictably, taken up the cause, and are leading the population in two of their favourite pastimes, protest marches and strikes. Fortunately, it is no longer the
nineties, and I no longer have to struggle with 'dix-neuf cents quatre-vingt dix-sept'. 'Deux mille treize' is much more manageable.
Speaking of four-score, there is a church in Paris called 'L'Eglise des Quinze-Vingts' (Church of the Fifteen Twenties, i.e. the Three Hundred). Herv'e Niquet and Le Concert Spirituel made some recordings there.
Andrew Clarke
Canberra
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