Every country has a national debate that produces real learning. This happened in the UK about two years after the Brexit vote, when many people were late to understand how the European single market works.
I have spent much of this winter following the French debate about the right retirement age. Any day now, parliament can pass a government bill to raise the age from 62 to 64. Arguments have raged everywhere from marches on the streets of Paris to “your rise” before dragging in parliament. A surprising fact has emerged that applies beyond France. Last month, I wrote that France led the world in allowing people to retire in the first golden decade. The main conclusion now: the lower social classes should be allowed to retire about ten years before the higher ones.
In general, there are two types of workers: low paid and high paid. The highly paid tend to study well into their twenties and may spend years choosing a career. They have a lot of autonomy at work, sometimes having an office and even a toilet to themselves. They control their own schedule, ratchet up their salary and status over time and decompress during the holidays by the pool. Some don’t want to retire. The tall usually live into their eighties.
Then think of low-paid workers like cleaners, cashiers and construction workers. They often enter vocational training in their teens and start working at 18. They have little autonomy: they are usually controlled by humans, and now more and more algorithms, which count like many phones. Many have spent years out of work, unskilled or unemployed. They have a job, not a career. At 60, he may still be scrubbing floors for minimum wage. When I dipped into this life for a holiday project, sorting milk crates on an assembly line, every minute felt like an hour. Some of my co-workers may have stuck around for 40 years.
Low-wage workers often suffer. Priscillia Ludosky, French leader yellow vest‘ uprising, told me that the nadir of Parisian suburban life is the packed train to the city on Monday morning. Victory had arrived home, broken, before the children had gone to bed. If your work life is yours, retirement can feel like liberation. But many low-paid people have disabilities or chronic illnesses in their early sixties and die in their seventies.
It is cruel to make both groups work until the same age. French economist Thomas Piketty says that instead of setting a retirement age, we should count working years. If everyone worked for 43 years, garbage collectors could retire at 60 and lawyers at 67. France’s national debate persuaded the government. The revised plan takes into account “long careers”: people who start working before 16 can retire at 58, while those who start at 18 can leave at 60 and so on.
But because of the class gap, the retirement age should be more graduated. Actually, that would make the pension system more complicated. Specialist commissions should probably keep updating the length of work for each occupation. As the work evolves, there will still be scrapping old rules, like those dating from the era of dirty coal locomotives, which allow French train drivers to retire at 52. But in this case, the complexity is fairer.
Another finding from the French debate: most workers really don’t like their jobs. And work seems to be increasing, perhaps thanks to technology that monitors employees’ breaks and keystrokes. In an analysis of the results of the European Working Conditions Survey for 15 countries, Mariann Rigó from the University of Düsseldorf et al found “that work stress has generally increased from 1995 to 2015, and that the increase is mostly driven by psychological demands. People in low-skilled occupations generally have a higher level of tension higher workloads and job imbalances. In Gallup’s latest annual State of the Global Workplace report, 44 percent of workers, an all-time high, reported experiencing “a lot” of stress the previous day. Only 21 percent felt engaged at work.
No wonder some countries have seen the “Big Quit”. If we need people to work longer, we need to increase their experience, perhaps by reducing monitoring. We also need to train them to do a better job. And we have to fight age discrimination so that people can hire them until they are in their sixties. If someone at the top of society is going to add to the burden on everyone else, then they need to understand what life is really about.
Follow Simon on Twitter @KuperSimon and email him on simon.kuper@ft.com
Simon will be speaking at the FT Weekend Oxford Literary Festival, which runs from 25 March to 3 April. For more details, please visit oxfordliteraryfestival.org
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