French labour unions stepped up the pressure on President Francois Hollande with threats of demonstrations over his pension reform plans on Monday, days before a panel tasked with advising his government is due to unveil proposals. Hollande has told the French they must expect to work longer but instead of pushing for an outright raise of the statutory retirement age from 62 has suggested only that the contributions period needed for a full pension may have to be extended.
Opinion polls suggest many people in France want Hollande to push ahead with economic reforms but pensions are a particularly sensitive topic. The last reform, which was undertaken by Hollande's predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy in 2010 and raised the retirement age from 60 to 62, caused hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets in French cities and a blockade of oil refineries.
"If the government takes decisions that are of the same mould as that of the previous government, yes, there will be protests," Force Ouvriere leader Jean-Claude Mailly, whose union is the third largest in France, told France 2 television. Mailly, whose union is strong among public sector workers, rejected extending the period of contribution from the current 41.5 years - one of the options in the report due to be submitted to the government on Friday. He also opposed any change to the method of calculating public sector pensions.
Private pensions are based on the average of an employee's best 25 years of earnings while public sector pensions are determined by the last six months' earnings before retirement - an arrangement intended to compensate public sector workers for lower earnings but which critics say is open to abuse.
"The pension issue will be the one that will cause the biggest grief over the next six months and create a lot of tension with the government - that's unavoidable," Mailly said. Separately, Eric Aubin, an executive member of the larger CGT union, said workers would have to "mobilise" - union code for protests - to put pressure on the government before the proposed reform is turned into a draft law, probably in late September.
Aubin told RTL radio there would be "problems" if the pension reform was based on leaked proposals of the advisory panel, which include cuts in tax exemptions on pensioners, squeezing future payouts and reviewing public sector pensions.
The conclusions of the panel will be officially submitted to the government on Friday and trade unions and employer groups will discuss options in talks due to start on June 20. The government has said it will study any proposals they make but is not bound by them.
Hollande wants any reform to have as wide a backing as possible. He angrily told the European Commission it could not "dictate" French policy after the EU executive urged it to take measures to reform its pension system by the end of 2013 and warned against increasing employers' social contributions.
Labour Minister Michel Sapin on Monday ruled out extending the official retirement age past 62. However, he told BFM radio that increasing the number of years people must actually contribute for a full pension was "a good hypothesis". Michel Barnier, the French European commissioner in charge of financial sector regulation, told the government to be bold on pensions reform.