In a statement issued shortly before unions were due todecide on possible further protests, Sarkozy said he was asking his government to make some amendments to the pension reform bill, but the rise in the minimum pensionable age would stay. “There is no question of going back on this,” Sarkozy said. “... working a little longer is the most reasonable path.”Union leaders have warned of an escalation after strikes and massive street marches on Tuesday against the rise in the legal minimum retirement age to 62 from 60, rallying support as a workers’ fears grow about austerity across Europe. Sarkozy said he would ask ministers to adjust the pension reform bill before parliament, which also raises to 67 from 65the age at which people are entitled to retire on a full pension in a plan to balance the system’s finances by 2020. However, rather than affecting the bill’s chief elements, the changes would accommodate complaints about the impact on people in particularly gruelling jobs, those who started working very early in life, and people relying on many different pensions schemes.
Showdown
Jean-Claude Mailly, leader of the Force Ouvriere union -- the most radical of the unions on the issue -- said before Sarkozy even made his announcement that he was pessimistic about the government’s willingness to backtrack. “It’s a showdown,” he told France Info radio. “The bill must be totally rewritten.”
The government has repeatedly said it will stand firm on what it considers the essential points. “When some people say the reform must be withdrawn -- that’s simply not possible,” Xavier Bertrand, head of Sarkozy’s ruling UMP party said. The government unveiled the reform bill in June. Without the changes, the pay-as-you-go pension system would run up annual deficits of 100 billion euros by 2050, it says. Heartened by the biggest strikes since 2003, the unions were set to meet on Wednesday at 1400 (noon GMT). They say Tuesday’s protests in well over 100 cities drew a turnout of 2.5-2.7 million people while the official count is 1.12 million. Either way, the turnout was significantly bigger than for a previous protest in June and big enough for unions to try to press their case further.
