Once again, the way the government presents a new law perpetuates gender/class disparity. Government officials use communication techniques to render this disparity invisible. Women’s unpaid domestic work, and women and men’s precarious work are marginalized and rendered invisible. French President Emmanuel Macron and his government have been pushing neoliberal policies hidden behind the rhetoric of public policies made for the public good to save the country from imaginary disaster. France is still a rich country whose elite pulls the strings of a postcolonial world, and the goal of its market-oriented president is still to serve the market and move the wealth of public goods to private markets.
Since his election, Macron has undertaken “to reform” French public services, diminishing the publicly funded safety net. A safety net is of special importance for women who have typically had very little control over their career because of lower wages and interruptions to their careers because of family responsibilities: women receive an average of 42% less in pension money than their male spouses. Among the 10% of couples who have the lowest level of revenue, one finds the highest proportion of women with either no revenue at all or unemployed or working part time.
Most recently, President Macron took on reforming the French system of pensions, which is based on solidarity and includes 42 exceptions according to levels of difficulty of work, replacing the solidarity system with a system based on points in which everyone can claim the same point regardless of their social conditions and difficulty of work. The French public noticed the discrepancy between the discourse of universality of the proposed system and the reality of growing economic disparities. The new so-called “universal” plan only pretended to be universal, failing to account for social and gender differences. In the difference of life expectancy between a factory worker and an executive, the latter may enjoy up to 10 more years in retirement because of life expectancy difference. Meanwhile, women’s unaccounted reproductive and domestic work were underrepresented in the 42 special schemes based on work difficulty.
While the reform purported to be more for women, some of the basic protections that widowed and/or divorced women could count on were removed.
The pension reform triggered complete mayhem in the public transportation services and other services such as distribution of electricity and public education, with the longest strike ever. France has been known for its integrative public transportation, the jewel of the country. And still nothing is more fragile at this time of restrictive funding and austerity measures than challenges to publicly funded services.
The scam of privatization was hidden in many reform proposals by then candidate Macron. He has changed many of these proposals for the worst claiming that he had been elected on the promise to change French society and to make the country more competitive. Actually, he won elected in the second round with a large number of votes from people who wanted to bar Marine Le Pen, an extreme right candidate who almost won.
Many economists criticized the proposed pension reform plan, arguing that the system is not financially failing and does not require such an ill-prepared, unfair plan that might bring more privatization than social solidarity. Even the “Conseil d’Etat” declared that the plan was amateurish and opposed it.
What was unforeseen, however, was the level of support from the general public for the strike and the social movement against this reform, despite the fact that it made going to work a real struggle.
I had the experience several times of going to work in Paris, having to take my car (which I almost never do) and leave in the early morning (around 4:30), then find a parking space near the city line, then take the subway that would work only during rush hours (a few hours in the morning, a few hours in the evening). The platform was always overcrowded and a few trains passed before I could get on. But the conversations were lively, with people talking about the parts of the reform that were unacceptable. Despite being squeezed to a level I had never experienced before, the conversation on the train was all about the importance of fighting for our rights and the future of our children as well as the importance of remaining in solidarity with the movement. We were squashed in a friendly atmosphere, sharing humorous political jokes and helping each other, a rarity for Parisians.
Although the current system is in financial equilibrium, that the government decided to rush to design this reform raised suspicion. While the pension system could have been improved and made more just, the government chose to ignore unions’ and economists’ proposals. The goal of this hastily proposed reform was not to gather consensus. The hidden piece concerns the incentive to subscribe to private retirement insurances for the higher revenue bracket, while encouraging feminization of poverty among older people. The Swedes, who passed a similar reform two decades ago, know that women getting older have lost rather than gained the comfort of retirement.
Some American asset-manager firms, such as BlackRock, were identified as having lobbied the government to open the pension system to the marketplace and more business opportunities for their French branches. In January, when the head of the French branch of BlackRock was tapped to receive a Medal of Honor for service to the nation, there was an immediate outcry. Olivier Faure, the head of the socialist party, declared, “It is anything but anecdotal, BlackRock, it is quite simply the dark side of the pension reform”.
The government is currently introducing its reform to Parliament while the opposition brings thousands of amendments to the floor to block the process. Throughout this process, women are used as an adjusting variable; gender disparity between classes and ethnicities are systematically ignored. Yet again, women lose. Meanwhile, on subway trains they regrouped and talked about their unstable careers, the lack of consideration for their invisible yet crucial work. Women in the global south have done that for a long time and now that the neoliberal and pseudo adjustment programs are reaching the north, people in France are learning what solidarity means.
(Photos by Brigitte Marti)
About Brigitte Marti