Secondary School Life. Singapore

untruths on pensions

For ATTAC and Copernicus Foundation

attacks against the various pension plans are increasing in Europe.

In France, since 1993 various reforms (1993, 1994, 1996 and 2003) resulted in a decrease in the amount of pensions. More than a million retired · e ⋅ s live below the poverty line and 50% of retirees have a pension of less than 1000 euros, or about 1450 Swiss francs.
-Sarkozy Fillon government intends to question the right to retire at age 60.

In France, various left forces are fighting for the vast majority of · e ⋅ s employee can retire at full rate, at 60. To this end, they argue tightly - the face of disinformation campaign the right of employers - and engage in advocacy, which will be difficult.

Indeed, the arguments - beyond the important differences between the current system in France and Switzerland - are useful for understanding the challenge of a very significant fight in France and also to counteract arguments used by the Swiss right to disqualify the PAYG system (AVS). (Ed.)

1. The average age of retirement is 61.5 years, reducing the legal age of retirement would not change nothing.

The average age of "retirement" is that which is asserting its right to a pension.
What is important is the age of retirement. The average age of cessation of employment is 58.8 years, and six out of ten employees are out (unemployment, disability, inactivity or exemption from seeking employment) at the time to liquidate their retirement.
Very often, employees who have had a short career and / or struck, especially women, liquidate their retirement at age 65 to qualify for retirement full rate with no discount, even though they are already out of the labor market.
Defer age of retirement beyond age 60 would have two consequences: the systems of unemployment or early retirement will have to pay more that the pension fund systems and less, and in parallel, the off-job before the age of retirement will stretch for many, with trivial or no resources. The age of the full rate (65 years) will be postponed accordingly, meaning that a growing proportion of employee · e ⋅ s will reduce its flights to reach the new terminal or have a pension amputated by the discount.

2. Life expectancy increases, it is normal to work longer.

Increasing life expectancy is not new, it has not prevented the time spent working in a parallel decrease in life.
In addition, life expectancy in "good health", that is to say without disabilities is much lower than life expectancy. Any retirement late hampers a non negligible time employees whose have to really enjoy their retirement.
Finally, young people are entering more and more active later in life and many employees, mostly women, have careers and staple already unable to meet the number of years required, even though the companies get rid of older employees.
Increasing the contribution period or delaying the legal age of retirement would have a significant impact upon the liquidation of retirement and would in practice by a reduced pension for the greatest number.

3. Young could not fund the pensions of future retirees, it is necessary that they work longer.

For that young people can pay the pensions of retirees, they need not be unemployed and therefore older employees leave their place on the labor market to new generations.
Shift age retirement is to prefer maintaining youth unemployment rather than pay pensions. The PAYG is based on an implicit contract: the generation that supports the work that is retiring what benefits the next generation and the latter takes over the generation training, and the party retired. Thus, each generation standing on the shoulders of the previous and the creation of wealth is shared between workers and retirees. Intergenerational contract is what the government and employers are trying to destroy, in wishing to work longer, the younger generations.

4. The PAYG system will no longer be able to guarantee decent pensions for younger generations, they must already protect themselves by forming an additional pension private savings.

If it is considered possible to complete the assessments for the public distribution system by payments into a private savings, what then prevents an increase in contributions and ensure a better retirement through PAYG?

5. Officials are privileged.

The level of pensions is equivalent in the private and the public: on average 1625 euros per month in the private [or about 2355 CHF), 1593 euros in the public [ie 2310 CHF].
The calculation of retirement is different in the private and the public, but this leads to a similar result. In the private sector, it is calculated on the best 25 years and premiums are taken into account. In the audience, it is the salary of the last 6 months, but the premiums are not taken into account and the supplementary pension is not the same level as in the private sector.

6. There will be too many retirees and not enough assets.

Projections Demographics are not scientific facts and are based on assumptions about several factors (fertility, unemployment, participation rates of men and women, etc..).
Already, in recent years, projections have varied widely. Thus, in the late 1990s, all official reports predicted a bust. It did not happen. Until recently, the same report provided a breakdown of the workforce in the future. The latest forecast by INSEE [National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies] are now reflecting an increase in the labor force until 2015 and then stabilized thereafter.
Furthermore, the assumptions on the workforce are very pessimistic, if not regressive: in fact there is no reason to project, in the range of 25 to 45 years, an employment rate of women below 15 points that of men if not permanently renounce any policy aimed at equality between women and men. Large leeway yet exist in this area, and an employment level equal between men and women means that we would find the same ratio of pensioners to active in 1970 So without any degradation.

7. We can not fund the pensions.

Unless you order the impoverishment of retired · e ⋅ s, it is normal to cover social needs related to the increase in their share of the population through increased levies on wealth produced. The pension fund deficits are mainly due to the stubborn refusal to do so.
However, the need for additional funding for pensions is feasible, as was calculated in 2007 by the NRC [Policy Board pension] between 1 and 2 points of GDP by 2050, compared with the fall in the share of payroll by 8 points over the past decades and with the corresponding explosion of dividends, which increased from 3, 2% of GDP in 1982 to 8.5% in 2007.
it is fair to increase the share of wages and pensions in the wealth produced by addressing the profits. Pension funding is possible if to end the current division of shameless wealth for the benefit of financial returns. It is this sharing that is taboo to blow, not the retirement age. It is a political choice of justice and solidarity.

8. The solution to finance pensions of increasing employer contributions would be detrimental to business competitiveness.

Different scenarios were studied, with the assumption on which the NRC is working with a productivity gain of 1.5% per year.
One of these scenarios is that it establishes quite possible to ensure both the maintenance of the replacement rate (average pension / average wage) and an identical increase in the purchasing power of retirees and employees (1, 2% / year, up slightly less than that of productivity) increased by 6 percentage points in employers' contributions between 2009 and 2050: the increase would not affect the sacrosanct business competitiveness, since this scenario is done by taking the assumption of maintaining its current level from the payroll (salaries and fees) in value added and thus no impact on costs.
This scenario, although not more favorable to the employee · e ⋅ s and retired · e ⋅ s, since it assumes that the share of the payroll remains at its current level is historically low, making it totally inoperative the only argument of the MEDEF [employers' organization in France] against the dues increase.
A scenario more favorable to employee · e ⋅ s and retired · e ° S is one that allows the share of the wage increases by cutting taxes on dividends, which leaves unchanged the cost of labor.

9. To finance pensions, we need a productivist growth.

Basing pension funding on the sharing of productivity gains do not mean that we put on a strong economic growth. Whatever gains future productivity, they must be shared between the living standards of all actives and retirees, meeting new social needs and the reduction of working time.

10. Family features that benefit women are contrary to the equality between men and women.

It is overwhelmingly women who take care of children and household management. As a result, they are penalized in their careers, they are interrupted or working part time. Even incorporating these devices family, retirement is on average 40% lower than men. They are still key to reducing inequalities between women and men board.
However, European Community law shall promptly questioned the existence of such devices. This is an inconsistency, since also recognizes the concept of indirect discrimination, that is to say, the legitimacy to give a special advantage since it reduces social inequality or gender. It is impossible to claim the principle of equality to increase inequality.

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Ten questions, ten answers on our pensions

By Gerard Filoche * and Jean-Jacques Chavigni **

1. What is the state of cons-pension reforms since 1993 for retirees and future retirees?

The fall in the amount of pension is like a movie in slow motion. It is only very gradually that these reforms will produce all its consequences. But ultimately, these consequences will be catastrophic.

The "reform" Balladur-Veil of 1993 was contested in the month of August in the general scheme of private sector employees. It increased the contribution period annuities of 2.5 (37.5 to 40). It has increased the number of the best years taken into account in the calculation of retirement from 10 to 25 years. Finally, the evolution of pensions were no longer indexed to wages, but on price.

The reforms of 1993, 1994, 1996 and 2003 supplementary pensions (Arrco - Association for the supplemental pension plan for employees - for all employees and Agirc - General Association of Pension Institutions frameworks - for executives) have resulted in an increase in the purchase price of the point value and a decrease in point value as the basis for calculation of retirement and therefore a decrease in the amount of those pensions.

Today, already more than a million pensioners live below the poverty line and 50% of retirees have a pension of less than 1000 euros. The measures taken by the right and the MEDEF [employers' organization in France] have exacerbated inequalities for all people whose career has not been smooth sailing. Especially women, whose pensions are already 40% lower than that of men who are now penalized by lengthening the contribution period and the severity of discounts.

In its 2007 report, the Board of the Pensions (NRC) estimated that 19-point decline in the average amount of pensions in 2030 as a result of "reforms" of 1993 to 2003. In 1993, the average net pension amounted to 78% of average net wages. In 2030 it will rise more than 59% of net average wage. The Council for Employment, Income and Social Cohesion (CERC) estimates, in turn, lower purchasing power of retired · e ⋅ s Public Service 0.5% per year and those of salaried · e ⋅ s private sector 0.9% (0.3% for the general scheme and 0.6% for supplementary pensions).

But this is not enough to the right and the MEDEF who want to continue to reduce the amount of unfunded pension while claiming the opposite hand on the heart. If we let them, in 2030, the vast majority of retirees will be under the poverty line.

2. Why must strenuously defend retirement at 60?

Many great minds (on the right but, unfortunately, also at left) tell us that the retirement age has more interest now that the contribution period increased to 40 and soon 42 years. Considering that the regressions imposed by the right are now parts of the pension landscape, it is indeed difficult to imagine how a young person who would begin working at age 25 and who should contribute for 42 years could expect to retire at 60 years. A simple sum shows he could not claim a full pension before age 67.

But if it is useless to discuss the legal retirement age, why is she so right to move the cursor? Because she knows that as long as this law exists, as this benchmark will be maintained, the employee · e ⋅ s may require that such right is not a mere inchoate right, but are put in place arrangements concrete that would allow the vast majority of employees can take their full pension at age 60.

Two other reasons can also the sense of maintaining the right to retire at age 60.

More than one million employees, first, have the entire period required for a full pension, but can not retire because they have not yet age 60. They have yet to work 2 or 3 years. With a legal age to 62 years is 4 or 5 years they would have to stay at work.

Second, because the decline or disappearance of the right to retire at 60 would almost automatically skip the lock 65. However, this lock is essential. It allows an employee whose career is incomplete to qualify for a full pension when he reaches the age of 65. They are, today, especially women who are concerned with 23% of women can benefit from a full pension before age 65. If the legal age of retirement was going to disappear or 62 years, Medef would use this setback as soon as leverage to impose the death of the buffer that is the age of 65.

For those who doubt the intentions of the MEDEF, they should remember that the MEDEF calls for the disappearance of two ages 60 and bumpers 65. They should also remember that in December 2000, the MEDEF had refused to help finance the supplementary pensions between 60 and 65 and that only the mobilization of more than 2 million workers had forced it to retreat. It should, finally, they do not forget that MEDEF had recurred blackmail in 2009 and a new negotiation on supplementary pensions is provided at the end of 2010.

3. Inevitable demographic she weighs about our pensions?

There were 11 million pensioners in 2000, they will be 21 million in 2040. It is a fact, an order of magnitude must. But this fact needs to be analyzed in detail and in context to draw all the consequences.

Firstly, the increase in the number of pensioners is due to two factors that weigh both the same weight: the lengthening of life and the arrival at the age of retirement of generation of "baby boomers" born between 1946 and 1976. But the latest additions to the generation of "baby boomers" will reach retirement age between 2036 and 2040. This will then " cohorts "who arrive at retirement age and from 2036-2040, the number of retirees will start to decrease.

The lengthening of life is not one quarter per year as loudly proclaim Sarkozy, Guéant [Claude Gueant secretary general of the Elysee] and Parisot [Laurence Parisot, the boss of the MEDEF] but quarter of 0.44 per year as estimated by the NRC report of 2007, based on the latest data from INSEE [National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies]. As the fertility rate of women would not like the $ 1.7 provided the first scenarios of the NRC, but closer to 2. In total, the population of working age would not suffer a decrease of 2.2 million people between 2006 and 2050 as in previous scenarios of the NRC, but remain stable. As for the increasing number of elderly, it would be less, because mortality would decline less rapidly than expected. The number of retirees would be below 650,000 in 2050 compared to the average of the previous two assumptions used by the NRC.

It is not enough, then, that the population of working age increases. Even then it has to have real work. This is not the path that is taken today with the increase in the number of unemployed due to the economic crisis.

To reduce mass unemployment, the resumption of growth will not suffice. In the medium term, in fact, increased labor productivity will nullify the effects of growth and not allow unemployment to fall. We must draw lessons from all of the 35 hours. Despite all the concessions made to the employers, who have strongly limited its effect, they had created 500 '000 additional jobs and start for the first time in 20 years to actually reducing mass unemployment. Reduce working time is a measure inescapable alone will end the unemployment and thereby improve the financial stability of our pension schemes.

Doubling the number of retirees, finally, will not happen in a France whose wealth would remain the same as today. In 40 years, with a growth rate of (modest) of 1.7% per year, the GDP of our country will double. In 2050, the amount of national wealth will be increased from 1900 billion to over 3.8 trillion euros 3 800 billion, once offset inflation that is to say the euro will have the same value as the current euros, of real dollars.

Doubling the number of retirees implies, if one wants to return to the "reforms" that have hit our pensions since 1993, increasing by 6 percentage points of GDP allocated to fund our pensions. Six points of GDP in 2050, this represents approximately 230 billion euros. With an increasing wealth of our country from 1900 euros on that date, it would leave more than 1650 billion euros for the increase in direct wages, contributions to health insurance, public and private investments, the shorter work and even profits. There is one condition for this is that the profits do not capture most of the 230 billion that should accrue to retirees. Yet this is exactly the intention of the government and MEDEF Sarkozy. It is the aim of all the "reforms" of our pensions since 1993.

4. Lengthening the contribution period allows it to maintain the pensions?

No. MEDEF and the government deliberately lying. They say: "Either increasing the contribution period is the lowering the level of pensions. " In fact, employees have won one and the other since 1993.
Indeed, far from the world of abstractions which seem to delight Sarkozy, with a term of 40 years of contributions, the 2 / 3 of private sector employees who retire are not at work. They are either unemployed or in disease, or disability. With a passage of 41 years of contributions, more than three quarters of employees who find themselves in this situation when they retire. How when one is unemployed, illness, disability could possibly be able to choose to stay at work? It is a mystery whose government jealously guard the secret.

When the MEDEF, it is not a contradiction, it requires longer than 45 years of contribution period at a time when companies no longer allow young people to access a full-time work until about 25-30 years (in the best case) and where they lay off with all his employees over age 55 (or 50).

Under these conditions, extend the contribution period amounts to increasing the period of unemployment, sickness, disability and thus reduce the amount of pensions. Indeed, the service credited in respect of periods unemployment and illness or disability will obviously not be considered for the top 25 annual installments. It will then go back to the years prior to unemployment, illness or disability to find the 25 best years. But with the revaluation of wages taken into account in calculating the pension, depending on the evolution of prices and not wages, the amount of retirement will take quite a blow.
The average duration of a career in the private sector is less than 37 years. Decide under these circumstances, it takes 40 years of contributions to qualify for a pension full rate is lower in large proportions (with the system of discounts) the amount of their retirement. The transition to 41 years of contributions would further exacerbate the problem.

5. The maintenance work of employees over 60 years is there an answer to the problem of our pensions?

Plan for national employment senior employment 2006-2010 - which is in line with the Lisbon Strategy adopted by the European Union - has set a priority to reach an employment rate of 55-64 years from 50% in 2010. This goal is unacceptable for at least three reasons.

First, because it is intolerable to force workers over 60 years to stay at work. Do not confuse officials, professionals, business executives, academics who are fortunate to have a creative work and the vast majority of employees for whom work is above all tedious and painful, with increasingly stringent conditions, more and more harmful to their health.

Medef, right, and sometimes unfortunately also a part of the left based on increased life expectancy to conclude that it is normal working hours increases. They forget that at 35, a frame can expect to live 46 years and a worker 39 years. They forget that life expectancy in "good health", that is to say, without major disability is only 64.2 years for women and 63.1 years for men, according to a recent note INSEE.

Secondly, because those who advance this "solution" have an attitude of "specialists," an autistic attitude of isolating the problem as if he had any social interaction. Now, if we force hundreds of thousands of employees over 60 years working, there are hundreds of thousands of young people who will not find work. The persistence of mass unemployment does not, by itself, can accept this solution.

Finally, because the future is promised to older workers is all but paved with roses. Not only the working conditions deteriorate, suffering at work is growing, reaching more cruelly older employees. But in addition, to encourage employers to hire elderly people, the right has established "old job" of the CSD (Term Contract) 18 month renewable one time. So precarious that opens its arms to elderly employees. They are licensed to work full-time permanent contract (Contract duer undetermined) at 55 years old to be rehired, two and a half years later, part-time temporary contract.

To be sure they can not escape it, the Minister of Employment Christine Lagarde expressed its willingness to abolish gradually the exemption from seeking employment for unemployed people over 57 and a half years because, says she, with all humanity that characterizes it, at that age " it is not broke. " Let it be said, for Ms. Lagarde, it is time to retire when you're done for!

The figure (which we constantly rehash) of 38.1% is an overall figure for employment of workers aged 55-64 (in statistics, it was 64 years on the eve of his 65th birthday ...). It should however distinguish between the use of 55-60 years should increase as part of a widespread decline in unemployment and employment of 60-64 years which should be minimized. This is for employees between 55 and 60 years is needed before any "develop workstations" and allow access to training. The priority for employees of 60 years should be quite different: to enable all those who want to retire with full pension.

6. The system of "notional accounts" adopted by Sweden is there a solution for our pensions?

Francois Fillon has just declared that there was no question of calling the whole system of pensions flat. However, it is quite possible to doubt. Why, indeed, Sarkozy said he would have exactly the opposite ago 6 months, turning what should be a simple "route point" between the social partners and government in an "important meeting"? Why does the government have asked the NRC report specifically on the possibility of replacing our system with an annuity scheme in points or notional account [1] as in Sweden? The most probable is that the government did not want to wave before the regional elections of March and he expected that the congress of the CFDT is completed to leave your hands free to Francois Chereque [secretary general of the CFDT].

The 2010 report NRC published after the regional elections and we can count on the government and MEDEF into reading the blackest possible so, if employees leave her hands free to vote (as usual for pensions) a law in the middle of July.

For the ROC, the impact of adopting the Swedish system on the level of pension would depend on the parameters set by policy makers. For him, no system can, in fact, merely by virtue of the technique, to adjust the accounts balance. To regain balance, the NRC makers therefore refers to the "three levers "Traditional" level of resources, the level of pensions and the average effective age of retirement. "

Sweden has moved from a defined benefits scheme [primacies annuity] to a defined contribution plan [defined contribution]. Under the old system, employees were sure of their pensions, the contribution rate to balance the system adapts. Today, employees are assured that the amount - medium and long term - for their contributions. The amount of retirement depend on the evolution of payroll and life expectancy at the time of retirement. The government has, in principle, no political responsibility to take is the system introduced in 1998 that, once and for all decided to share the national wealth to be allocated to pensions. That did not stop to intervene when the shock is too large and could cause social response. Thus, with the recession and the decline in payroll in 2009, the pension would decrease 4.5% in 2010, the State has intervened to ensure that this decline is limited to 3%!

If life expectancy (Measured by the same tables as those of private insurance) increases, the amount of pension will fall, without, again, the government has any responsibility to make policy without any public debate. Each employee, alone in his corner, choose "freely" age of retirement, but with a gun to his head, that of a retirement that will not allow him to live if he leaves too early.

With this system, while collective mark disappears, and any collective demand also. It is true that the succession of cons-reforms since 1993 led today to approximately the same result: no one knows how much will retire in 10 or even 5 years. This is not, however, a reason to adopt a system as impenetrable as the Swedish system. It should, instead, to restore confidence in our retirement system division to enable the vast majority of employees to retire at the full rate at age 60.

In the Swedish system, as in the pension point so dear to the MEDEF is the entire career is taken into account in calculating retirement and not as now, the last 6 months in the function public or the best 25 years in the basic scheme of private sector employees. In both systems also, periods of maternity, unemployment, illness or disability are not intended to be taken into account. In total, the rate of wage replacement for retirement can only decrease. Solidarity has given way to the growth rate and mortality tables.

7. The right and the government have given up trying to impose our pension funds?

No, Medef recalls

constantly need to "supplement" the PAYG pensions by funded, that is to say, pension funds, whether or not "French." As to the right, his role is to oil the wheels to help Medef solutions to prevail.

In France, pension funds have taken the name of "retirement savings" to reassure employees. But this "retirement savings" has the same flaws as traditional pension funds. It is profoundly unequal. Only managers and some employees of large Companies have a real capacity to save. For the vast majority of employees, it is already difficult to make ends meet at the end of each month. And employers in abundant amounts so paid (2 billion each year) will add to initial inequality.

"Saving for Retirement" is deeply risky: it is willing to play his retirement in exchange for the funds collected are invested in stocks, and often shares as according to the "financial experts" who have an interest to encourage such investment, their performance would be better than bonds and bonds. But after the bubble burst of new technology in 2000 and after the recent financial crisis that has wiped out the retirement savings of hundreds of thousands of American workers, very few employees are in our country, ready to take that risk.

is one of the reasons for the decline in the PAYG is also important for the MEDEF. It will, of course, first, do not increase the amount of payroll taxes for employers and especially large groups can reap maximum profits. But he also wants the decline in PAYG to make room for pension funds "French" that are a challenge for insurance companies and financial capital. Leaving a field of hundreds of billions to pay indirect shared them completely unbearable. Over the PAYG will decline, more employees will be afraid for the amount of their future retirement and pension funds, despite all their faults, will be as a last resort for employees.

8. The reserve fund is there a solution for our pensions?

Created in 1999 by Lionel Jospin, the pension reserve fund should have a life of 40 years with a first phase of accumulation funds, from 2000 to 2020, and a second phase of use of funds, from 2020 to 2040 .

The first phase was to accumulate 1,000 billion francs (150 billion euros), most of which would come from the surpluses of the National Insurance old age, those of the Old Age Solidarity Fund and investment income from their investment. But for these funds have surpluses, it would have more resources for unfunded pension reform and repeal Balladur Veil-1993.

This has been done by either the left or the right course. It is therefore not surprising that the reserve fund has received only 35 billion euros before the financial crisis.

As to 330 billion francs (50 billion euros), which were the result of investment in stock funds accumulated, they are transformed, with the financial crisis, a loss of 7 billion euros. In total, the reserve fund has been accumulated 28 billion euros.

If he had been fed as desired by Lionel Jospin, This fund would, in any event, failed to address the need to fund our pensions. Indeed, used in 20 years, the 150 billion would have represented an accumulated flow of 7.5 billion euros per year. A stream of very distant actual financing needs of our pension system: 65 billion euros annually by 2050 if we let the reforms already put in place by the right full force and effect and 200 billion if one wants the net pension (average) return to 78% or 75% of net salary (average) as before the 1993 reform. That is why the fund had been presented as a mere "adjustment fund" to simply spread the increase in pension contributions over time in case of sudden increase in the number of retirees.

remains 10 years for this fund. It is not excess CNAV (National old age insurance) -10.7 billion deficit expected in 2010 - or the Old Age Solidarity Fund (3.9 billion euro deficit in 2009) that will enable to accumulate the 122 billion euros missing. Investments stock market will probably allow to accumulate a few billion, but these gains will inevitably transform into heavy losses during the next financial crisis. What is he? Feeding the reserve fund with the proceeds of privatization as some propose? That would go against the preservation and expansion of public services.
There is no miracle to expect from the Reserve Fund and it will find other ways to fund our pensions.

9. How to finance our pensions?

The deficit of the general scheme (old branch) should, according to government projections, to be 10.7 billion euros in 2010 after 8.2 billion in 2009 and 14.5 billion in 2013. The increased deficit was due in part to cyclical reasons: the economic crisis that reduced the wage bill and thus the amount of pension contributions.

But this explanation has a structural deficit evident: the stagnation of employer contributions for 30 years, then increases the number of retirees. In 2050, if these resources are not increasing and if we deny that the vast majority of employees find themselves in poverty, the need for funding of our unfunded pension will amount to 200 billion euros (constant) per year , 200 billion euros annually in a country whose GDP has doubled, it is 6 percentage points of GDP. Between 1960 and 2000 the share of GDP devoted to pension funding allocation had increased by 8 points, why is it impossible to grow by 6% between 2010 and 2050? Must still explain how the 6% could be mobilized.

The priority is to end mass unemployment. But this would not be sufficient to fund our pensions in 2050.

It would be then necessary to broaden the base of pension contributions by addressing niche social "is to tell the wage income that does not undergo any levy or a standard deduction of 4% for all social security contributions. The shortfall associated with the device association of employees in company performance is measured between 6 and 8.3 billion euros in 209 and, therefore, to double in 2050 if the income change at the same speed as the GDP.
should finally increase the rate of pension contributions.

Sarkozy, January 25, 2010 affirmed the need to "put everything on the table." He promised to review all tracks. Curiously, however, He has mentioned that "the prospect of a longer contribution period" and ever to higher pension contributions.

Yet in its latest report, the NRC found that "the positive effect of rising premium rates on the balance of the system is immediate and lasting." In its 2001 report, the NRC estimated that even with unemployment reduced to 4.5% of the workforce, it would still increase by 15 percentage points higher pension contribution to balance our pension schemes in 2040 and return a replacement rate of about 75% of salary (as before 1993).

Fifteen
point increase in 40 years (from 2000 to 2040 or 2010 to 2050), this represents an increase of about 0.37 percentage point per year. A rate of 0.25 point for employers' contributions and 0.12 points for contributions, this increase is obviously preferable to widespread poverty among retired · e ⋅ s promises that the continuous extension the contribution period. This option, however, were immediately excluded from public debate.

For employee · e ⋅ s, the dues increase would be offset by amounts that would go more pension savings fund and the return to a replacement rate of 75% of net earnings would reduce the use of family solidarity in favor of the elderly.
As employers, it was too high increase its pension contributions, he could always start with abandon to finance "retreats hats" of its leaders and alleviate all the money it spends to finance pensions . Veolia Environnement could, thus, saving 30.2 billion euros funded (and these are the provisions of a single year) to fund "retreats hats "Its Executive Committee, of which 13.1 million euros for the single" pension cap "its CEO, Henri Proglio.

The competitiveness of our country if it called into question by this gradual increase in the rate of pension contributions? Not if one replaced the "moderation" by the "fiscal restraint" and if the amount of dividends paid to shareholders decreased to compensate for the increase in payroll taxes. It is quite feasible. The amount of dividends paid to shareholders increased by 5.2 percentage point of GDP since 1982, to the detriment of wages. These dividends are unproductive and only serves to fuel financial speculation which we have seen the terrible effects. Lower dividends paid to shareholders would not affect productive investment and would not increase the price of goods or services invoiced by the company, despite the increase of pension contributions. The competitiveness of firms would not be affected.

10. What concrete measures to save our PAYG?

Our PAYG pensions are now seriously threatened. The continual decline in the amount of retirement, heavy uncertainty over the future of pensions are in the process of breaking the pact between generations. How the younger generations could she, in fact, accept that their contributions go to fund the retirement of the generation that no longer work when they themselves feel they will not receive retirement or pension schemes if their will not live?

For the younger generations have confidence in our retirement system division, they must ensure that they will have a proper retirement at an age (60 years) they will still hope to live healthy for many years.

This would require either a set of measures taken inseparable.

• First, repeal the reforms of the line since 1993 and require, by law, employers finance the supplementary pensions in the private sector so that this goal is reached.

• Ensure minimum replacement rate of 75% for a full career.

• Ensure that no pension shall be less than the minimum wage. [Minimum wage]

• Index the wage taken into account in calculating retirement and changes in the amount of retirement, once the latter wound up on wages rather than prices.

• Consider the time not worked due to maternity, occupational accidents and diseases, as well as involuntary part-time periods are worked full time and that is taken into account when calculating the retirement, the salary normally paid.

• Back to 37.5 years of contributions to be eligible for full pension as the duration true mean for a career will not exceed this figure. • Validate

study periods after 18 years as periods of seeking their first job upon registration at the employment center. [Servive public employment]

• Allowing employees who performed heavy work to take their full pension at age 55. This measure, however, does not relieve act upstream on the working conditions so that these works harmful to health disappear.

Only in this way can the confidence of younger generations in our system of PAYG pensions can be restored. Otherwise, it will be the door wide open to pension funds and misery for the vast majority of retirees in the decades to come.

* Gerard Filoche member of the National Socialist Party, labor inspector, a member of the Copernicus Foundation. ** Jean-Jacque Chavigni, co-author with Gerard Filoche SOS-Safely! Editions Le Bord de l'Eau.

1 , see About the "notional accounts" section of The Observatory pension http://www.observatoire-retraites.org/index.php?id=180 (Ed.)

How Much Does A Bathroom Extractor Cost

What's alive and what is death in social democracy? The issue of pensions

By Tony Judt , March 2010

This text is based on a lecture given at New York University October 19, 2009. Delivered to an American audience, it retains its significance for Europeans, even more committed than their cousins across the Atlantic to the history and legacy of social democracy.

The Americans would like things to go better. According to public opinion studies conducted in recent years, all want their children to have a better chance of life at birth. That's what they prefer if their wife or daughter had the same chance of surviving motherhood than women in other developed countries. They would be happy to have full medical coverage at a lower cost, greater life expectancy, better public services and less crime. When told that these things exist in Austria, Scandinavia or the Netherlands, but they come with higher taxes and a State "interventionist", many of these same Americans say "But it's socialism! We do not want the state interfering in our affairs. And most importantly, we do not want to pay more taxes. "It's a strange inconsistency. This strange cognitive dissonance is an old story. There is a century, we remember, the German sociologist Werner Sombart asked: Why is there no socialism in America? There are many answers to this question. Some are related to the size of the country: it is difficult to organize and pursue common objectives across Imperial. There is also, of course, cultural factors, including the typical American distrust towards the central government. This is indeed no coincidence that social democracy and welfare states are more successful in small homogenous country where mistrust and mutual suspicion does not occur with equal intensity. Be prepared to pay for services rendered to others and their earnings based on the idea that, in turn, they will do the same for you and your children: because they are like you and see the world the same way as you. Conversely, when immigration and visible minorities have altered the demographics of a country, it is typical that we felt more distrust of others and little enthusiasm for the institutions of the welfare state. Finally, it is undeniable that social democracy and welfare states are facing serious challenges practices today. Their existence is not questioned, but they are not as confident as they once seemed.

History a prejudice

But my concern is how is it that here in the U.S., we have so much trouble if only to imagine a different kind of society while inefficiencies and inequities of our concern us so much?

We seem to have lost the ability to challenge the present, still less to offer alternatives. Why are we so incapable of conceiving another form of organization for our mutual benefit? Our failure is - forgive me for using academic jargon - discursive We do not just talk about these things. To understand why this should be the case, we must make some appeal to history. As Keynes had once remarked: "The emancipation of the mind necessarily involves a study of the history of opinion." To achieve a mental emancipation, I propose that we take a minute to study history of prejudice to the universal use today "economism", the invocation of the economy in every debate about public affairs. Over the last thirty years, in large parts of the world English (although this is less the case in continental Europe and elsewhere), when we wondered if we support a proposal or initiative, we do not ask if it was good or bad. Instead, we examine whether it was effective and productive. If it would be good for the gross domestic product. If it would contribute to growth. This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to limit ourselves to the question of profits and losses - economic issues in the narrowest sense of the term - is not instinctive in the human condition. It acquired a taste. We have already known. In 1905, young William Beveridge - whose report in 1942 would lay the foundations of the British Welfare State, gave a lecture at Oxford in which he wondered why the political philosophy had been overshadowed in public debate by classical economics. The question of Beveridge is equally valid today. Note that this eclipse of political thought is not from the writings of the great classical economists themselves. In the eighteenth century, what Adam Smith called "moral sentiments" was at the forefront of economic talks. Indeed, the idea that we can limit the public policy to a simple economic calculation was already concern. The Marquis (the Condorcet, one of the most insightful writers on the mercantile capitalism in its early years, anticipated with distaste the prospect that "the eyes of a hungry nation, freedom will not be more than the necessary condition security of financial transactions.

The revolutions of the time were likely to encourage confusion between freedom to make money ... and freedom itself.

But how, in our time did we come to think solely in economic terms?

The fascination for an economic vocabulary etiolated did not come from nowhere. Instead, we live in the shadow of a great debate in which most people know absolutely nothing. If we look who exercised the greatest influence on contemporary economic thought English, five foreign-born thinkers come to mind: Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Popper and Peter Drucker. The first two were the outstanding "grandfathers" of the Chicago school of macroeconomics of the free market. Popper is known for his advocacy of "open society" and his theory of totalitarianism. As for Drucker's writings on management exerted a huge influence on the theory and practice of business in the prosperous decades after the boom of the war. Three of these men were born in Vienna, a fourth (von Mises) in the Austrian city of Lemberg (now Lvov). All were deeply shaken by the disaster that struck their native Austria in the inter-war period. After the cataclysm of the First World War and a brief experience in municipal socialist Vienna, the country was victim a reactionary coup in 1934 and four years later, the invasion and Nazi occupation. These events forced them all to go into exile, their writings and teachings - those of Hayek, in particular - should take place within the shadow of the central issue in their lifetime why liberal society had collapsed and she Had she given way to fascism - at least in Austria?

Their answer: the attempts of the Left (Marxist) to introduce in Austria after 1918 a state-directed planning, services in the hands of the municipality and a collectivized economy had not only proved illusory, but were directly produced a cons-reaction. The European tragedy had been caused by the left: first, because it could not achieve its objectives and then because it was unable to defend themselves along with his liberal heritage. Everyone, albeit in a different register, drew the same conclusion the best way to defend liberalism, the best defense of an open society and freedom was the accompanying leave the government out of economic life. If we kept the state at a safe distance, if we prevented politicians - be they well intentioned - to plan, manipulate or direct the affairs of their fellow citizens, the extremists of both right and left would be held in failure. John Maynard Keynes was facing the same challenge how to understand what happened between the wars and prevent their return? The great British economist, born in 1883, grew up in a Britain stable, confident, prosperous and powerful. Then, his vantage point at the Treasury and then as a participant in peace negotiations at Versailles, he saw his world collapse, taking with him all the reassuring certainties of culture and class. Keynes would also the same question that Hayek and his Austrian colleagues. But he would respond very differently. Yes, Keynes recognized, the disintegration of the late Victorian Europe was the searing experience of his life. Its essential contribution to economic theory was actually the importance he attached to the uncertainty down remedies which had faith in classical economics and neoclassical, Keynes insisted on the essentially unpredictable in human affairs. If there was one lesson of the Depression, fascism and war, it was the uncertainty - high level of insecurity and fear collective - was the corrosive force which had threatened and could even threaten the liberal world. Keynes therefore sought to give a greater role to the State to ensure social security, including but not limited economic intervention by the cons-cyclical. Hayek suggested the opposite. In 1944, in his classic The Road to Seifdom he wrote "No description given in general terms can not give an exact idea of the resemblance between much of the current English political literature and the works that destroyed faith in Western civilization in Germany and created the mindset that allowed the Nazis to win. In other words, Hayek explicitly stated that the Labour Party came to power in England would lead to fascism. Now the Labour actually prevailed. But their victory resulted in the implementation of policies that, for many of them were directly related to Keynes. During the next three decades, Great Britain (as much the Western world) was governed in the light of the concerns of Keynes.

The success of the European welfare state

Since then, as we know, the Austrians have taken their revenge. The question of why this happens - and why at this point - is an issue that could usefully be addressed at another time. But, for whatever reason. we live today with the muffled echo - as the waning light of a star - a debate held there seventy years born men, mostly in the late nineteenth century. It is certain that the economic terms in which we are led to believe are not usually associated with these distant political disagreements. However, do not know them is to speak a language qCon not fully understood. The welfare state had its credit notable accomplishments. In some countries, it was social democratic, based on an ambitious program of socialist legislation, in others - in Britain, for example - it prompted a series of pragmatic policies to alleviate social disadvantage and reduce the excessive wealth and excessive poverty. The common and the universal realization of the governments neo-Keynesians of the post-war they were succeeded remarkably in reducing inequalities. If you compare the gap between rich and poor, both in terms of income or capital in all countries of continental Europe and in Great Britain and the United States, you will see that is reduced considerably during the generation after 1945. Greater equality is accompanied by other benefits. Over time, the fear of returning to political extremists - political desperation, political envy, political insecurity - has lessened. The western industrialized world has entered a period of successful safe prosperous bubble maybe, but a comforting bubble in which most people would have fared better than they ever have hoped for once and had good reasons await the future with confidence. The paradox of the welfare state and indeed all States Social Democrats (and Christian Democrats) in Europe was simply that over time, their success undermine their attractiveness. The generation that remembered the thirties was, as one can understand, the more determined to preserve the institutions and tax systems, social services and public benefits they saw as bulwarks against the return of the horrors of the past. But his successors - even in Sweden - were beginning to forget why they had been searching for this kind of security. This is social democracy which has linked the liberal middle-class institutions in the wake of the Second World War (I use here the term "middle class" in the European sense). In many cases, it enjoyed the same social assistance and social services themselves that the poor free education, medical care cheap or free, public pensions and so on. Consequently, the European middle class found itself in the sixties with its provision of income well above what they were in the past, since much of the necessities of life were covered by taxes. Also, the very class that had been exposed to so much fear and insecurity in the inter-war period was now closely inserted into the democratic consensus of the postwar period.

The Return of inequality

However, in the late seventies, this type of consideration has been increasingly neglected. First with tax reforms and employment ThatcherReagan years, and immediately after the deregulation of the financial sector, the inequality is again a problem in Western society. Following a significant decrease from 1910 to 1960, the index inequality has grown over the past three decades. USA Today, the "Gini coefficient, which measures the gap between rich and poor, is comparable to that of China ('). If one considers that China is a developing country which will inevitably widen significant differences between the few rich and many poorer, the fact that we have here in the U.S., a similar coefficient of inequality speaks volumes about the delay we have taken over our old aspirations. Take the Personal and Work Opportunity Act Responsibilily (2) 1996 (It is hard to imagine more Orwellian title), the Clinton-era law that was trying to empty the contents of the provisions of the welfare state here in the United States. The terms of this law we should recall another law, passed in England, nearly two centuries ago: The New Poor Law of 1834. Its provisions are familiar with the description of its operation by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist. In the famous passage where Noah Claypole mocked the little Oliver, calling him "Work'us (Workhouse (3), he means, in 1838, exactly what we mean today when we speak with contempt" welfare queens (4). The New Poor Law was atrocious, it forced the poor and the unemployed to choose between work for any wage, even very low, and the humiliation of the hospice. Here and in most other forms of public assistance of the nineteenth century (still being designed and labeled "charity"), the level of help and support was calibrated so that they are less attractive than the worst alternative available . This system was based on classical economic theories that deny any possibility of unemployment in an efficient market if wages fell so low and there was no alternative attractive to work, everyone would find a job. During the hundred and fifty years, reformers have sought to replace such humiliating practices. The right to public benefits from welfare has finally replaced the New Poor Law and its foreign equivalents. Unemployed citizens were no longer regarded as having the least deserved and they were not penalized for their situation and it does not implicitly placed in doubt their capacity as members of society. More importantly, the mid-twentieth century welfare states have introduced the idea it was totally incorrect to define status of citizenship based economic participation. In the United States today, at a time when unemployment is rising, a man or a woman without a job are not full members of the community. To receive if only the meager social benefits available, they should have first sought and, where they exist, have accepted a job regardless of the proposed salary, even a small and unpleasant job. Only then will they enjoy the respect and help their fellow citizens.

admiration of wealth

Why so few of us they condemn such "reforms", adopted under a Democratic president? Why are we so little moved by the stigma attached to their victims? Far from us to question this practice back to the early industrial capitalism, nor shall we're too well adjusted and that a consensual silence - revealing contrast compared to the previous generation. But as Tolstoy reminds us, there is "no state of existence to which a man can not get used to, especially if it sees them accepted by everyone around him. " This "disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or at least, to neglect, persons of poor and modest condition [...] [...] is the great and the most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. " This is not me saying that. These words were written by Adam Smith, who considered the probability that we admired the wealth and poverty despised, admired and disdained the success of failure, as the greatest danger we face in the mercantile society he predicted the advent. We're there. The most telling example of the kind of problem we face is in a form that many of you may find it a mere technicality: the privatization process. Over the last thirty years, the cult of privatization has fascinated Western governments (and many non-Western governments). Why?

The quickest answer is that in an era of budget constraints, privatization appears to save money. If the state has a public program or an inefficient public service cost - A hydraulic station, a car factory, a railroad - it seeks to give it over to private buyers. The sale reported, as expected, money to the state. At the same time, passing in the private sector, service or transaction in question becomes more efficient through the mechanism of the profit motive. Everyone has something to gain the service improves, the state gets rid of a liability improperly or poorly managed, investors are making profits and the public sector performs in a one-time gain on the sale. That's the theory. The practice is very different. What we have seen over past decades is that public accountability has been moving to the private sector without the community gains a visible advantage. First privatization is ineffective. Most (The activities that the overnment has seen fit to enter the private sector operating at a loss: whether railway companies, coal mines, postal or power plants, the cost of their supplies and their maintenance is higher than the income they can expect to retire. Would For that reason, this kind of public property was by nature unattractive to private buyers, at least to provide them with a very high discount. But when the state sells at low prices, the public suffers a loss. It was calculated that. during privatization in the United Kingdom at the time Thatcher deliberately low price at which public goods were long on the market to the private sector had the effect of transferring 14 billion pounds net taxpayers to shareholders and other investors . In this loss, we should add other 3 billion pounds in fees paid to banks who provided the transaction of privatization. The state has actually paid some 17 billion pounds (30 billion) to the private sector to facilitate the sale of property that otherwise might not find takers. These are considerable sums of money, equivalent to almost exactly to the endowment of Harvard University, for example, or gross domestic product of Paraguay or Bosnia-Herzegovina (5). 11 is difficult to analyze it as an efficient use of public resources. Secondly, this is where the question of moral hazard. The only reason why private investors wishing to purchase public goods is apparently ineffective as the state eliminates or reduces their risk exposure. In the case of the London Underground, for example, the purchasing companies were assured that, whatever happens, they would be protected against a serious loss - thus undermining the traditional economic argument for privatization: the research profit encourages efficiency. "Laléa" in question is that (lans conditions as fortunate, the private sector would be as ineffective (IUC counterpart public - taking as much profit as possible and letting the losses borne by the state. The third argument, perhaps the most significant. cons of privatization is as follows. It is no doubt that much of the goods and services the state wants to get rid were mismanaged incompetent management, under-investment, etc.. Nevertheless, even poorly managed, postal services, railway networks, retirement homes, prisons and other services, whose privatization is planned, remain the responsibility of public authorities. Even once sold, they can not be totally abandoned to the whims of the market. They are by nature the kind of activity that someone has to regulate. This division semi-private, semi-public responsibilities essentially Collective goes back in fact a very old story. If your return is checked in the U.S. today, although it is the government which has decided to investigate you, the investigation itself will most likely be conducted by a private company . The latter has contracted to perform this service on behalf of the State, the same way that private agents are under contract with Washington to ensure safety, transport and technical expertise (with profit) in Iraq and elsewhere. Similarly, the British government now contracts with private contractors to provide home care services for seniors, formerly liability under state control.

The decline of the state?

In short, governments outsource their responsibilities to private firms who claim to manage better and at lower cost than the state itself. In the eighteenth century, it was called the leasing taxes. The first modern governments often lacked the means to collect taxes and thus proposed, form of bidding, to private parties to undertake this task. The highest bidder got the job and was free - once he had paid the agreed amount - to collect what he could and keep the proceeds. The government was therefore a discount on its expected tax revenues in exchange for money paid in advance. After the fall of the monarchy in France, it was found that in general farming of taxes was a grotesque inefficiency. First, he discredits the State, represented in the popular mind by a greedy profiteer private. In Secondly, he reported less revenue than a system of effectively managed public perception, even if only because of the margin of profit accruing to the private collector. And thirdly, we unhappy taxpayers. United States today we have a state discredited and inadequate public resources. Interestingly, we have no disgruntled taxpayers - or at least, if they are unhappy, it's usually for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, the problem that we ourselves have created is essentially comparable to that which was facing the Old Regime. It goes today as in the eighteenth century by emptying the state's responsibilities and capabilities, we reduced his public position. The result is the "gated commnunities (6)" in every sense of the term sub-sections of society who like to think functionally independent of the community and its officials. If we deal only or mainly with private agencies, over time, we dilute our relationship with the public sector which we do not seem to need. It hardly matters that the private sector do the same things better or worse, a higher cost or lower. In both cases, we reduced our allegiance to the state and lost something vital that we should share - and that in many cases we used to share - with our fellow citizens. This process was well described by one of its greatest modern practitioner is said that Margaret Thatcher stated "such a thing as society does not exist. There are only individual men and women, and families. " But if such a thing as society does not exist, but simply individuals and the state "night watchman" - watching from afar the activities in which he plays no role - what is it that will bind us together? We already accept the existence of private police forces, private postal services, private agencies responsible for fueling the state in war and many others. We have "privatized" precisely the responsibilities which the modern state was loaded with great difficulty during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What will be the buffer between citizens and state? Certainly not the "company" strongly pressured to survive the evisceration of the public domain. Because the state is not about to disappear. Even if we deprive him of all his responsibilities in relation to services, it will - even if only as a controlling force and repression. There would be no institutions or loyalties intermediaries between the state and people: nothing would remain of the spider web services and mutual obligations that bind citizens to each other through the public space that they collectively occupy. This meant that individuals and private companies in competition for the state to divert their personal benefit. The consequences are no more attractive today than they were before the advent of the modern state. It was indeed very explicit assurance that no group of individuals can not survive long without objectives and common institutions which could prompt the state to build as we have known it. The very idea that there may be a public interest to increase the private benefit seemed to have clearly absurd liberal critics of industrial capitalism emerging. In the words of John Stuart Mill, "the idea of a company holding only by relationships and feelings born of Interest cash is essentially repulsive. "

Rethinking State

What should I do?

It starts with the state: as the embodiment of ~ collective interests, collective goals and collective goods. If we fail to re-learn to "think of the state," we will not go very far. But what should the state do precisely? At least it does not duplicate unnecessarily. As Keynes wrote: "What is important for the government is not doing things that people already have them and tin little better or a little less but to do things that, for now are not done at all. "

Now, to have had bitter experience in the last century, we know that there are things that states should certainly not do. The story presented by the twentieth century the progressive evolution of the state rested precariously on our claim to "us" - reformers, socialists, radicals - have History on our side: our projects, in the words of the late Bernard Williams, had been "acclaimed by the world" (7). We did not today as reassuring story to tell. We just survived a century doctrines claiming that with a disturbing insurance that the state should do and to remind people - by force if necessary - that the state knew what was good for them. We can not go to all this. So if we must "think the state" once again, better start to grasp the limits.

A useless rhetoric?

For similar reasons, it would be vain to resurrect the rhetoric of social democracy of the early twentieth century. During those years, the Democratic Left emerged as an alternative to different kinds of Marxist revolutionary socialism much less inclined to compromise and - in recent years - in their communist successor. There was thus by nature in social democracy is a strange schizophrenia. While walking with confidence in front of a better future, she kept throwing nervous glances over his left shoulder. We she seemed to say, are not authoritarian. We are for freedom, not repression. We are democrats who also believe in social justice, regulation of markets, and so on. Until the first goal of the Social Democrats was to convince voters that they were a radical choice in the respectable liberal system, the defensive position made sense. But today this kind of rhetoric is incoherent. It is no coincidence that as Christian Democrat Angela Merkel can win an election against his opponents in Germany Social Democrats - even at the height of a financial crisis - with a set of policies on all essential points resembles their own program. In one form or another, social democracy is the language of contemporary European politics. There are very few European politicians, and certainly even less to positions of influence, which would disengage from social democratic fundamental assumptions about the obligations of the state, although they may differ in their scope. Consequently, in Europe today, the Social Democrats have nothing distinctive to offer in France, for example, even their impulsive tendency to encourage state ownership hardly distinguishes instincts Colbert of the Gaullist right. Social democracy needs to rethink its goals. The problem does not lie in the social democratic policies, but in the language in which they are made. Since the challenge of the authoritarian left has disappeared, the insistence on "democracy" is largely redundant. We are all democrats today. But "social" means something else - probably more now that a few decades ago, when all sides were accepted without question that the public sector had a role to play.

What is so distinct from the "social" of social democratic approach to politics?

Imagine, if you will, a train station. A real train, not Pennsylvania Station in New York is a shopping sixties bankrupt, stacked on a coal cellar. I think something like Waterloo Station in London, the Gare de l'Est in Paris, the spectacular Victoria Terminus in Bombay or the superb new Berlin Hauptbahnhof. In these remarkable cathedrals of modern life, the private sector works perfectly well in his place there is no reason, after all, only at newsstands or cafes are run by the state. Just remember the dry sandwiches, wrapped in plastic, the cafes of British Railway to admit that in this area should encourage competition. But trains can not be managed in a competitive manner. Railroads - such as agriculture or the mail - are at once economic activity and a fundamental public good. In addition, you can not make a system of railways more efficiently by two trains on track to see which performs best performance Railways are a natural monopoly. So improbable, the English have in fact established a competition of this kind between bus services. But the paradox of public transport is obviously better than he did his job, the less likely it is to be "effective." A bus provides an express service for those who can afford it and prevents remote villages, where there would rise from time to time a retiree, will bring more money to its owner. But someone - the state or local municipality - must continue to provide local service unprofitable and inefficient. Otherwise, the economic benefits Short-term resulting from the removal of this benefit will be offset by long-term damage caused to the community as a whole. As might be expected, except in London where there is enough demand for this system to work, the coaches 'competitive' have therefore resulted in increased costs borne by the public sector increased rates as high that the market could bear, and attractive profits for companies express bus. Trains, like cars, are primarily a social service. Anyone could run a line of railway profitable if all he had to do was to organize the shuttle express from London to Edinburgh from Paris to Marseille, from Boston to Washington. But what kind of rail links in both directions of the localities where people do take the train from time to time? Nobody will set aside sufficient funds to cope with the economic cost is the maintenance of such a service for those rare occasions when he uses it. Only the community - the state government, local authorities - can do. Subsidies necessary always seem ineffective in the eyes of some kind it would surely economists cheaper to remove track and that everyone uses their car. In 1996, the last year before the privatization of British Rail, British Railway boasted of having government subsidies lowest of all European railways. That year, the French were planning an investment rate for their railroads of 21 pounds per capita, the Italians from 33 pounds to the British only 9 pounds (8). These differences were reflected accurately in the quality of service provided by the respective national systems. They also explain why the British rail system could be privatized only through a strong infrastructure loss was totally inadequate.

How to estimate costs?

But unlike investment demonstrates my argument. The French and Italians have long treated their railways as a public performance. Operate a train in an isolated area, even if not profitable, maintains local communities. This reduces damage to the environment by providing an alternative to road transport. The railway station and the service it provides are a symptom and a symbol of the company as a common aspiration. I suggested that ensuring the highest rail service to remote areas has a social interest even if it is economically "inefficient". This, however, raises an important question. The Social Democrats will not go very far in offering laudable social goals, which they admit themselves that they are more expensive than the alternatives. We would eventually recognize the virtues of social services, to denounce the cost ... and do nothing. We need to rethink the methods we use to assess all costs: social as economic. Let me give an example. It is cheaper to provide poor relief under the benevolence that guarantee them the right to a whole range of social services. By benevolence s> I mean the faith-based charity, private initiative and independent aid based on income as well (the food. To grant shelter, providing clothing etc.. But it is notoriously humiliating to be the recipient of such assistance. The older generation still remembers with disgust, even angrily, "the survey on resources" practiced by the British authorities on victims of depression 1930s (9), 11 is not, however humiliating to be the beneficiary of a right. If you are legally entitled to unemployment benefits, a pension, a disability allowance, housing or other municipal assistance provided by the public authority - no one investigates to determine if you dived enough down to "earn" assistance - you will not feel embarrassed to accept it. However, this kind of legal rights available to everyone is expensive. But what would happen if we treated the humiliation itself as cost, a burden to society? If we decide to "quantify" the harm done when people are stigmatized by their fellow citizens just before receiving the basic necessities of life?

In other words, what would happen if we took into account in our estimates of productivity, efficiency or well-being using the difference between a humiliating and a benefit resulting from a right? Perhaps we would conclude that the provision of social services open to all public health insurance or subsidized public transportation was in fact a cost-effective achieve our common goals. Such an exercise prepared by nature controversial how to quantify the "humiliation"? What is the measurable cost of the deprivation of access to resources of cities to individual citizens? How much are we willing to pay for a good society? It is not clear. But it is only asking these questions we can expect answers (10).

A moral critique What do we mean by a "good society"?

In a normative perspective, we could start by a "narrative" in which moral locate our collective choices. This type of story assuming the strictly economic terms that limit our conversations today. But to define our objectives in this manner is no small matter. There is no doubt that in the past, social democracy has addressed the problem of good and evil, especially since she has inherited a pre-Marxist ethical vocabulary steeped in disgust Christian for wealth and the worship of materialism in their extreme forms. But such considerations were often punctuated of ideological questions. Capitalism was doomed? If it were, a given policy progressed she anticipated her death or she could to delay it? If capitalism was not convicted, the policy choices should be designed from a different perspective. In both cases, the relevant question typically addressed Outlook "system" rather than the virtues or defects inherent in a given initiative. Such questions do not concern us most. So we are confronted more directly to the ethical implications of our choices.

What we find particularly odious in financial capitalism or the "mercantile society" as it was called the eighteenth century? What we think instinctively go wrong with our current organization and what can we do? That we find unfair? What offends our sense of ownership when we face lobbying unhindered rich at the expense of all others? What have we lost?

The answers to these questions should take the form of a moral critique of the inadequacies of the totally free market or incompetence state. We need to understand why they offend our sense of justice or fairness. We need to come back in focus for the world. Here, social democracy is of limited help as its own answer to the dilemmas of capitalism was a late formulation of moral discourse of the Enlightenment applied to "the social question." Our problems are quite different.

A new period of insecurity

We are, I believe, now entering a new period of insecurity. The last of this kind, which Keynes was a famous analysis in The Economic Cousequences of the Peace (1919), followed decades of prosperity and progress and a fantastic increase in the internationalization of existence, "globalization" that does lacked in name only. As described by Keynes, the commercial economy had spread worldwide. Trade and communication quickened to an unprecedented rate. Before 1914, the idea that the logic of economic exchanges peaceful triumph of national selfishness was widespread. Nobody expected to an abrupt end. That is what happened. We also crossed us a period of stability, certainty and the illusion of unlimited economic improvement. But it's all over now. In the foreseeable future, we will be in a state of economic insecurity as much as cultural uncertainty. We certainly have never had so little confidence in our collective goals, our environmental well-being or personal security since the Second World War. We have no idea what kind of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude it look at ours in a way reassuring. We need to review how the generation of our grandparents responded to similar challenges and threats. Social democracy in Europe, the New Deal and Great Society here in the United States, were explicit responses to insecurity and inequity of the time. Few people in the West are old enough to know exactly what it means to attend the collapse of our world (11). We find it difficult to conceive of a total breakdown of liberal institutions, a complete disintegration of democratic consensus. But it was precisely this kind of collapse that caused the Keynes-Hayek debate and which are born the Keynesian consensus and compromise social-democratic consensus and compromise in which we grew up and whose charm was overshadowed by his very success . If social democracy has a future, it will be as a social democracy of fear (12). Rather than trying to restore a discourse of optimism about progress, we should first inform us about the recent past. The first task of the dissident extremists today is to remind their public achievements of the twentieth century and the probable consequences of our reckless rush to dismantle them. To put it bluntly, the left has something to keep. Is the d, 'ilo inherited the ambitious modernist thirst to destroy and to innovate on behalf of a universal project. We need the Social Democrats, whose style and features a modest ambition, speak with more confidence of past achievements. The growth of public social service, construction, throughout a century, a public sector whose goods and services and demonstrate our collective identity and promote our common goals of the institution with Social faith in me-right and its benefits as a social obligation: it is not meager accomplishments. They have been little more than partial should not worry. If we should remember a thing of the twentieth century would be to have at least understood that the answer is more perfect, more implications are terrifying. Improvements in imperfect circumstances are unsatisfactory that we can expect the best and probably all we should seek. Others have spent the last three decades to undo and methodically to undermine these improvements : What should we put more angry than we are.

What should also concern us, if only for prudential reasons why were we so eager to demolish the dams in place with great effort by our predecessors? Are we so sure there will be no flood?

can fight for a social democracy of fear. Abandon the work done for a century is to betray those who came before us and generations yet to come. It would be nice, but wrong to assume that the social democracy, or something resembling it, is the future that we peindrions as an ideal world. It does not even represent the ideal past. But among the options currently available, it is better than anything else. In the words of Orwell, Homage to Catalonia in reflecting on his recent experiences in revolutionary Barcelona "There are many things in there that I have not understood that, somehow, I did the same not, but I immediately saw that they deserved to be fought for them. "I think it is no less true that we can save the memory of the social democracy of the twentieth century.

(1) See "High Gini IS loosed upon Asia", The Economist, August 11, 2007. (2) Translator's note: "Act on individual responsibility and work." (3) Translator's note: Hospice. (4) Ndt The equivalent would be "queens of allowance" in French. (5) Cf Massinio Florio Great Kills Divestiture Evahiating the Welfare Impact of the British Privatization, 1979-1997, MIT Press, 2064, p. 163. For Harvard, cf. Harvard endosvment posts solid positive return, "Harvard Gazette, September 12, 2008, For the GDP of Paraguay or Bosnia-Herzegovina see www.cia.gov / library / publications / the-world-factbook / geos / xx. html. (7) Bernard Williams, Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 114. (8) For these figures, cf. my "I Was a famous victory," The New York Review, July 19, 2001. (9) For comparable aid humiliating memories. cf. The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ballantine. 1987. Casey Selwyn thank you to my attention. (10) The International Commission on Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, chaired by Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen advised by, recently recommended a different approach to measuring well-being. But despite remarkable originality of their proposals, neither Sen nor Stiglitz have done little better than to propose better ways of assessing economic performance, the non-economic concerns do not occupy a prominent place in their report. See www.stiglitz-zen-fitoussi.fr/en/index.htm. (11) Bosnia whose citizens know only too well what is entailed such a collapse is obviously the exception. (12) By analogy with The Liberalism of Fear, penetrating into text by Judith Shklar on inequality and political power.

M Jak Milosc Odcinek 788 Online

By Bernard FRIOT,

As in all European countries - with their specific - the issue of pensions is on the agenda. Depth reflection is necessary. The contribution of this text by Bernard Friot is very useful. Bernard Friot was published in March 2010, Editions La Dispute a book titled "The issue of pensions." This book renews the look on the "happiness of the retiree, who enjoys the" wages continued, "and whose work is finally released from the capital. Bernard Friot book by its analysis. He did it first Red Square for the magazine.
*****

I appreciate the opportunity to speak here of the book I published in March. The central issue of pensions is the emancipation of the working of labor value. All the necessary institutions already exist to this emancipation. They are the result of a pragmatic construction. They must be given now to a theoretical density as the foundation of an alternative discourse to the dominant pitch. On pensions, the case heard and seems not to suffer from the debate: there is a pension problem. A demographic problem, first. With the passage of an asset for a retiree to double within 50 years, the matter under the President of the MEDEF (French employers' organization), would be "neither right nor left, but arithmetic.

An accounting problem, then: the current deficits and especially such that would be provided in an emergency "rescue the PAYG system" by reducing its benefits, "complete" by capitalization.

A moral problem, at last: he would restore the "solidarity intergenerational "because we would be taking us up rights that will force our children to pay us in the future pensions of a too high level view of what they can produce. And Mrs. Parisot (MEDEF president) is not the only one we say successive governments right and left telling us for twenty years, the experts we repeated reporting relationships, and consensus is shared. We must fight to break this consensus. This is the meaning of this book. The result of my research and my reflections can be summarized in the following proposals.

1. The goal of reformers is to terminate pensions as "wages continued"

reform pursued with great continuity through a series of regulations and laws by successive French governments since 1987 is to to terminate the pension system as "wages continued." This is alongside Medicare the central component of "socialized wage" that I made history and theory in a previous book [see And the payroll tax will create jobs (1999) and Powers of the wage: employment and social protection to the French - 2008].

After abandoning the system of retirement savings by the Vichy government in 1941, the pension for private sector employees will gradually move towards the "continued processing" of the public. The rights of civil servants based on their classification (rank) and not on their job (their position): attached to their person, their rank does not go with them out of business and their pension calculated on the basis of their last (and best) salary is continuously upgraded by the current value of the index that was used to their calculation. It is the continued salary, and this model of public service will be implemented in companies with status (SNCF, EDF-GDF, to take the most important). As a replacement for higher wages of the person, indexed on the average movement of wages, it is the horizon for employee · e ⋅ s private sector whose pensions will approach the wages continued with reference to the 10 best years and indexing wages. This growth is ensured by a steady increase in the contribution rate from 8 to 25% of gross salary ente 1945 and the 1980s. Just before the reform, the sample of retired international regimes gives the replacement rate of final salary pension income by the first net full career retirees born in 1930: it is an average for the private sector, 84%. Certainly, all retirees do not have a full career, especially women, but women can expect, with the improvement in the employment rate of cohorts reaching retirement in the 2000s, a significant improvement in their situation . It is women that reform, which stops this progression is first.

What justifies talking about "reform" is the singular consistency determination reformer governments, both left and right, who share and pursue a project made clear since 1991 in the White Paper of Michel Rocard. Discerned: Chirac indexes the pensions of private sector prices by regulatory action Balladur from 1987 until 1993 into the law for five years, legislation that perpetuates Jospin in 1998, Raffarin that extends to the public in 2003 Fillon and special schemes (SNCF, EDF-GDF ...) in 2008.

Rocard in 1991 sets out the principles of separation between contributory and non-contributory, curing conditions of full retirement at age 60, to extend the period of wage Reference and lengthening the duration of a full career as Beregovoy, who tabled the 1992 bill did not have time to implement and realize that Balladur in 1993 as a first step complete Raffarin 2003. Juppe spleen in 1995 reform of the special Fillon realizes that in 2008 his law on pension funds has no implementing regulations when it loses power and the repeal Jospin to create a reserve fund and a formula salary savings that will die in retirement savings that implements Raffarin, with the added bonus of compulsory pension fund Public Service. Jospin refuses its Communist allies a law making possible the full retirement before age 60 for workers with long careers because it intends to make the currency exchange reform regime officials that its failure in the presidential elections will not give him the opportunity to carry out, but that Raffarin is negotiating with the CFDT a famous May 16, 2003 ... against retirement before age 60 for workers who have contributed forty years. Jospin installed in 2001 a Guidance Council retreats from the repository that produces consensus for reform, from 2003, 2008, and the next he just drawn the broad outlines in his report of January 2010.

reform can be summarized in two central aims: to give a halt to the movement quantity of continuation of salary in the pension at age 60 and qualitatively, releasing the pension salary to bind to savings, deferred income and allocation guardian, three forms of decidedly non-salary resources.

2. What a retiree?

A retiree is not an "old". Some decades in fact, in everyday language, government officials or senior executives, who first attained retirement, were not designated as "old," a term reserved for workers or employees who have received a pension with a real replacement rate of their salary than in the 1970s. Even today, the "old" means more a woman than a man, not primarily because older women are dying, but because they can access more easily to the pension.

A pensioner is even less an "old" and even longer a "retired" it affects a large share of his salary of activity. And this board is a salary for life. Whatever he does, this wage is irrevocable. It touches every month without fear of losing accounts and without him being asked about its legitimacy. And what does he do with this salary for life? If healthy, he has maintained his professional life, or created from a social network project leader, he works. These are retirees who say they "have never worked so hard," they "have never been happier to work." While it is where a large minority, but on almost fifteen million retirees, it made the world! This makes children see their grandparents happy to work when they find that their parents, they deplete it, torn between bitterness, anguish and rage.

And if the pension reform had to do with the contradictory experience of happiness and unhappiness at work? What is the secret of happiness retirees to work? Between the conditions under which workers and retirees are working, what is the difference that explains the source of unhappiness for some is a source happiness to others? This difference is obvious: the salaries of retirees are irrevocable, they are unemployed and do not appear on the labor market, they do not produce under the dictatorship of the working time: in a word is their personal qualifications they deploy.

Then the "save pensions!" Reformers took a different direction. Not cope with an aging population and a shock which my book shows that they are fantasies, but bring back the old home. Reaffirm that the retirement of leisure time after a well deserved long working life. That work is a matter of employment and therefore employers and the labor market. That serious things are between shareholders, executives "talented" and editorialists, economists, and he must let the seniors play in the sandbox of their "activities". Remind employees that they are not holders of a qualification entitling them to scrutinize the purposes and means of work, but a livelihood generating a right to a deferred income after their last job. Brief return the record straight on capital.

3. What we said about reform of capitalism

Capitalism is this specific form of organization of production that the measure - which gives it value - the average working time needed. The work has no value. It is, in its abstract form present throughout the production value measurement. Goods worth the time and effort needed for their production, not the individual time, but time reveals that the average price at which they exchanged. Only capitalism measure output per work, because it was built on the basis of an abstract social: Report exchange between sellers and buyers of "labor force" dedicated to producing the goods, that is to say, goods or services measured not by their usefulness, but by how much work they incorporate abstract. The labor market defines individuals as labor force "job seekers".

These forces work can be implemented at the initiative of employers who buy on the market and implement them according to the logic of the work value for the production of goods, only generating profit. For there to be profit requires that all workers and products, will be transformed into a commodity, and thus whether the common denominator of these goods, namely the time of abstract labor needed to produce them, which becomes the measure of all things. Hence the dictatorship of the working time that will introduce competition intercapitalist. The organization of production on the basis of such an abstraction is marked by a fundamental contradiction: it empowers the capital from the traditional way of working, which is the source of infinite momentum in the production of goods, while being widening effects of the exploitation of farmers dispossessed their creative abilities and destined to produce goods that elude them.

Today, we are much richer that forty years ago (the GDP has doubled in constant euros), but we are much worse this crucial dimension of our lives is work. The finding of a broader consumer no longer offset the bitter experience of uncertainty, disinterest, disdain and fatigue at work, all that doubt was installed on the consumption of products whose growing merchant affects the quality or purpose. Briefly, aporia of a dynamic production that mutilates people astray and products are now bursting into the open.

Happiness at work is that retirees, particularly, with the assurance of a salary for life, they work free from the yoke of labor value. This experience is massive, but unspoken in public space: the number of pensioners living as a privilege even they are embarrassed when they compare their happiness at work and the misfortune to work as an "asset". It is important that private happiness becomes public, demonstrating that the experiences of retirees at work can become the universal standard.

4. The personal qualifications of retired frees the work of "employment"

wages continued based on personal qualification. In the significant minority of retirees who are at work, in forms and objects they choose, there are people that engage three assets: a pension in real wages compared with their best, they recognized capabilities will cross able to transpose (the manager of a small company that will become a judge at the Commercial Court or the teacher of accounting treasurer of an amateur sports club), a personal network of peers that usually they had made before retirement, or they could build in the early years of retirement.

These are the three essential ingredients for personal qualification, which is attached to the person, not employment, and who can actually implement in freedom: the absence of One of the three makes it more difficult to "second career" retirees. Armed with a personal qualification, retirees are able to work off the shackles of work ethic: they do not need to appear on a labor market nor to submit to an employer, or to transform their production into a commodity. The activities of retirees are they work? Yes if it disassociates the work of employment. There is no essence of the work, which is designated as "work" is contingent, very different from one society to another or from one century to another. It is constantly the subject of public debate. The logic of employment means that any work that falls outside the measurement time does not really and has not be paid. However, because employment, which reduces people to the labor force subject to work value has been, historically, the vector of the socialization of wages through the payroll tax and qualifying positions, the definition of Work is now torn between employment and wages socialized.

"Work", is the part of our business dedicated to producing goods to supply the capital (employment), or is it part of our business that implements our qualification (salary socialized) ? The recent employment of a whole series service activities for people turned them into work, and the worst way for the last wave of them, home services, modern processing jobs jobs because the wages associated with these jobs socialized is low. Contradictorily, the finding that the pension is close to a salary continued to be perceived as work activities for pensioners carried out any work. And draw all the consequences for the change of meaning of work which carries the fact of assuming such work activities delivered in the labor market and work value. We can, from the experience of retired, impose a different basis of social recognition of work: no longer use, but the qualification of people.

5. The confusion around the "intergenerational solidarity"

The traditional argument that the retirees are not working said they depend on the work of the assets which would be responsible for the pension contribution. This argument is false. The prenotion who wants that "active fund inactive", and that the payroll tax is a "tax on work" is based on confusion between money flows and value streams. The value has its support in the wealth produced, money is an expression of value but not its support. The work of retirees creates wealth that is assigned a value, and pensions are the monetary expression of value. The value attributed to the work of retired merchant has no measure, it is measured by their personal qualifications, which, as with any qualification, is associated with wages, pension.

The illusion of "social transfer" as a transfer of value from one group to another, comes from the creation mode money in our capitalist economies. The form required in the capital for the creation of money is crucial because the tyranny of labor value, key extortion of profit is possible only if the production is commercial. Do not create money that during the anticipation of sales of businesses, so it have the force that constantly imposes the law of capital. If only goods are an opportunity to money creation, then any recognition of non-market work, any recognition of the work not subject to work value, has two consequences. On the one hand, it leads to higher commodity prices, which should include recognition of additional work that does not find its direct recognition, and this increase is always denounced as an obstacle to competitiveness in times of global competition to cut corners "costs of labor." On the other hand, this recognition is actually by "transfer" money in the form of taxes and social contributions that are permanently disqualified as "tax burden".

This expression of combat based on the erroneous equation of flow cash flow and value. As money is created on the occasion of the price assigned to goods of capitalist enterprises (through the expectations of this award by banks lending to these companies), which measures the value of the wealth created by Retired passes through these goods, and thus a flow of money going to hold employment in the capitalist sector to the pensioners through the pension contribution. But it is not a transfer of value: what are the retirees who produce the wealth that is assigned the value corresponding to their qualifications.

6. The population problem is a fantasy, the increase in employer contribution rates is possible and necessary

The consensus on the existence of a demographic shock, the argument founder of pension reform, rooted in the absurd belief that our society ages and the ratio between the generations is a major social issue. Yet the concepts of generation and age, who obviously have a meaning in the field of biography or that of family, have no relevance in the society. Today, including in a statistical framework that is inactive retirees, long-life societies are more productive than firms with low life expectancy, whose GDP per capita are lower, which destroys the demographic argument. And, as regards the production of wealth, and retirees are not in a report generation: they have the same status of employees paid to the qualifications, except that employees work in subordination to an employer and Retirees not.

But it is precisely the extraordinary originality of the retirement pay that is continued solved the "problem of old age" by transforming the "old" by employees. Continued salary as a pension is the first denaturalization of extent of a feature biography, and its abstraction also carries a strong enrichment of citizenship. We understand that "the return of old" (older people will say of course) is the horizon obsessive reformers, they are constantly feeding back the generational issue. Because the bulk of the business reforms since the White Paper Rocard is painting apocalyptic giant deficits that the aging population will generate in pension plans division.

is a fantasy construction, including if we think in statistical ranking executives in the inactive retirees. On the one hand because a demographic report is not an economic report: that the ratio of over 60 years will double the 20-59 years of no interest, since the ratio of unoccupied the occupied (the only one who has an economic significance) will remain relatively stable over the coming decades. On the other hand, because the demographic shock is based on the assumption of no productivity gains. Now we can produce as much an asset with for a retiree with two active retiree.

The argument that the declining share of the employed make it impossible to finance pensions for apportionment is as absurd as if we had predicted in the early 20th century famine in France of the 21st because by farmers would be reduced to less than 3% of the population. For over sixty years, our pension plans by socialization wage show that we have assumed no growth of the weight problem of pensions in GDP well above its future growth. Over the past fifty In recent years, pensions were increased from 5% to 12% of GDP, while during the next fifty, they should increase from 12% to 20% if one removes the reforms undertaken since 1987: the weight of pensions been multiplied by 2.4 between 1950 and 2000, there should be only 1.7 per 2050.

Unless calculations are based on a perspective that no stagnation of GDP reformers does this deceleration (when the speech involves a demographic shock acceleration fantasized) obviously means an easier tomorrow absorb the increased weight of pensions, even though it has been easy so far. This facility is simply explained: the GDP volume doubling every forty to fifty years, the fastest growth of any of its elements is accompanied by progress, not regression, wealth available to other components. Increases in GDP, there is no need to strip the assets to dress retirees.

7. The fight against retirement savings should continue

The demonstration of the harm of financial accumulation, which resulted in no investment growth, but contributed greatly to the bubble, does not reformers continue to argue for retirement savings with two arguments. The first is "intergenerational equity": the rights to pensions is that the generation today is at work will be an excessive burden on future generations. This requires that each generation, at least partially finance their own pensions savings which will be liquidated upon entry into retirement. Especially since - Second argument - the work will fail to meet the needs relatively (we recognize here the rhetoric of the "demographic problem"), and we will be happy when the famine to have saved the money we can then liquidate to offset the deficit work. Both arguments are wrong.

The money deposited in savings used to buy financial stocks which were in themselves worthless. But - and this is the origin of belief in their ability to freeze the value - they are titles of ownership with rights to argue about money outstanding on the day they will be liquidated. If the currency does not exist prior to this change currency securities, the securities are worthless. Now it is routine work that makes possible the creation of money prior to the liquidation of securities.
other words, assuming that pensions are insured by the savings of pension funds, sale of shares necessary for the transformation of savings into pensions in 2040 will depend on the currency will then have assets willing to buy to establish themselves rights. This coin will be the equivalent of what they have produced by their year's work 2040. In this case, saving is useless because the assets could be assigned to a regime breakdown that currency used to purchase securities. That either distribution or capitalization, is still the year's work that produces wealth equal to the money that finances the pensions of the year. The savings can therefore never be a substitute for work, or allow each generation to fund its pensions. His promotion is in fact based on two things. On the one hand, ownership of securities can puncture of money on the work of the world, while the distribution is reduced to the national space policy rules of labor law: the magic of imperial thinking. On the other hand, as the stock performance is outside the acute financial crisis, higher than the growth rate, the pension is growing faster than wages and thus that the pension contributions, which are progressing more slowly than the rate Growth: assert in favor of capitalization that is more cost saving than contributing is very ingenuously confess that any retirement savings is a flight on the work of others, and is infinitely more profitable to have a portfolio of securities work.

Promote the use of property involves tackling the lucrative property, whose salary as a pension shows the futility continued. Lucrative property is defended by reformers in the name of the investment, which means, they say, investors. Now what is an investor? Everyday speech, carefully maintained by the scholarly discourse, said he brings a needed capital. Nothing is further from the truth. An investor does nothing. An investor who "provides" for example one million euros for a company not a million euro banknotes in a suitcase, nor the titles he bears are endowed, by a curious metaphysical, of any value: they are profitable titles which will give him the right to puncture a million on the value assigned to work today. An investor is a parasite that has the right to puncture a portion of the value of contemporary producers to transform and expropriated the labor force and compel them to produce the goods he has decided to produce short, to work under the yoke of labor value. An investor is robbing us and alienates us in the same operation.

In the successful experience of the pension contribution was the large-scale demonstration of the desirability to move from financial investors. This contribution is the way to ensure no commitments massive savings and long term, comparable to the investment. On the model of social contribution, we can not fully fund the savings investment. If it is possible to fund the pension to the benefit schemes and pensioners without any logic savings and loans, it is possible to finance investment in the same way by assigning a fee economic wage (about 35% of gross salary), levied on value added products such as payroll or direct salary. This fee would be collected by investment banks that would finance without interest rates, since there would be no private accumulation of capital. Financial accumulation, credit, loan interest, exchange, these institutions can be replaced by transposing to finance the investment experience of the social security contribution, which is obvious since any investment is financed from current production. Social contribution has freed our daily individual moneylenders, the economic contribution rid our everyday lives of the scholarship and bankers.

8. The "deferred income" and "national solidarity" reinforce the institutions of capital

The reform attempts to stop the rise of this institution pay by changing the direction of pension plans in distribution: of a pension distribution to ensure the continuation of salary to a pension distribution providing deferred income doubled to national solidarity. For this pair, it shall reinforce the institutions of capital.

There are indeed two contradictory forms of pension plans division, the wage and pension scheme. The board as a continuation of salary (salary system) is based on maintaining the personal qualifications of the employee or retiree on the allocation of private average skills of its best uses: it raises people as employees equipped with a capacity to produce. Instead, the pension as deferred income (insurance scheme) is based on rights proportional to the contributions of career with purchasing power guaranteed: it raises people as employable with an earning capacity. The heart of the pension reform is to shift from first to second form of distribution. It has to do three levers: the freezing of rates of contributions, indexation to prices and the rise of contributivité understood in the sense of "individual actuarial neutrality" (for each, total contributions to the career be equal to the total pension). A contribution rate which is stabilized over the long term based on distribution according to a calculation strictly contributory pension whose purchasing power is guaranteed by its indexation on prices are the three characteristics of a deferred income. His promoters know that, based on a single calculation without compensation rules (like validations quarters without contributions) and taking into account periods of very low wages in professional careers, it leaves all those resources and especially all those were unable to provide a sufficient contribution account. This is why the promotion of actuarial neutrality is always coupled with a plea for a broad national solidarity funding, alongside the deferred income, a "contributory minimum" Guaranteed and "non-contributory benefits (minimum pension, subsidies for children). The speech is as reformer with the dual virtue of justice strictly contributory benefit and solidarity with the "poor". There is a considerable decline compared to the wages continued.

Regression in justice, first. Making the board's consideration of my past contributions, and thus subject of my work, not the news of my qualifications (and therefore my work emancipated) assumes and reinforces the labor market, employment, goods The subordination and the lucrative property. Denied in its qualifying producer, providing employable is maintained in a state of minor economic constantly to thank you for the employer who poses as a holder of a livelihood which he derives income. Foresight is what remains when the employee was stripped of the essential qualification. The proliferation of notional accounts when necessary to ensure security and ability to bounce back to a worker placed, including within his company, a labor market that continually submit to the suspicion of distance to the Employment he holds or to which he applied.

The salary system is instead carrying the award of a qualification to each person, without exception, under any pretext whatsoever, with an indefinite continuation of salary. The contribution of each to its resources based not on its ability to save part of the gains made as a labor force (the "contributivité" reformers), but its ability to participate in the definition of objects released from work the goods and labor value. His report in the future then rests on the support of his qualification and not a heritage that can provide alternative income to the remuneration of jobs: in fact, the distinction between employment and out of work, incorporating the binomial compensation / pension, is exceeded in the continuum of the qualification. This new continents of the deployment of human personality to discover. Conversely, the regime of foresight locks us into the capitalist past.

regression in terms of solidarity, then. The invitation to solidarity with people victimized is probably one of the most perverse aspects of the reform. By asking people as "poor," "victims" entitled to solidarity, it naturalizes the disqualification of producers inherent to capitalism. Capitalism is the shareholder and the "leader of great talent" he has placed at the head of the company the only players, the only subjects of production. Employees are then reduced to a minor social status of victims if they fail to maintain their employability: victims of the inevitable job losses and no less inevitable relocation, victims of inadequate training, victims of the crisis. Many victims are entitled to national solidarity, government responsibility. The couple shareholder / victim is thus continuously reactivated, naturalized, because it is essential to maintaining the institutions of capital. There is no possibility of a proprietary profit or tyranny of the value of work without a denial - which precisely defines the victim-law of the qualification at the heart of wages. While in contrast the wage solidarity based on the promotion of skills for all, founder of solidarity between equals: not that of the sighted to those they will be called poor, but of political deliberation in the award Qualification for everyone and for the sake of its being exercised.

9. Progressive development of pensions is a political

In terms protest, the progressive development of pensions as earnings continued to assume an argument with a negative component and one positive.

The negative aspect would be to deny everything that impedes the continuation of salary and deferred income supports the binomial / national solidarity: - stability or even decline for low wages, contribution rates - indexation Prices wage taken into account in calculating pensions and pensions paid - the listing of contributions in individual accounts as of ARRCO AGIRC and the lens shift manager replacement rate Match wage to the rate of return on contributions - the distinction between the contribution and the share of non-contributory pension, the CSG and the Old Age Solidarity Fund, the minimum contribution, the challenged subsidies for children and reversion - the individual actuarial neutrality as an ideal of justice with reference to the pension to the entire workforce and not just better salary - The abandonment of legal age (except as age floor should be raised beyond 60 years) and longer duration of assessment, Premiums and discounts - the distinction between state pension and pension professional, employee savings. The positive aspect should have three pillars: - promote the affirmation of the pension as earnings continued in the current regimes: no pensions below the minimum wage, wage indexation, the annual increase rate of employer contributions (and income if the gross salary is increased in proportion), calculation of net pension on the basis of 100% of net salary for a better career fully validated 150 quarters, no discount liquidation of retirement at age 60 or the date of cessation of business whichever is later (or earlier at age 60 for arduous work) - to push a policy to support the personal qualification of retirees in the public sphere and not just private, individually and collectively not only: their support networks of peers to help them define objects of work, to form or join labor collectives, funding projects. It is encouraging retirees to business and thus invent new ways of production released of work value. Such liability is certainly very happy, but needs a political device to be exercised, including the rights associated with a political age are a decisive factor: 60 years of age into retirement, has become a age policy.

10. A single claim: the personal qualification for all

is the third axis of the positive component. Freedom and happiness of retirees to work must be the result of all those who are at work, and this is the condition of their remaining in the pensioners themselves. Following their example, the personal qualification must replace all employment as a support for social and economic rights. We measure how much this proposal and the earlier re-evaluate the role of pensioners, which assumed to rely strongly on their employee status to end their treatment as "seniors" called him by the reformers.

The personal qualification, new media rights now enshrined in employment, is a collective right (like the pension, the amount of which is personal, is a collective right). It is already anticipated among pensioners and in the public service. It will be awarded to any person, for example at the end of high school, and it progresses without breaks or reversals until his death. It has four interrelated components: - certificate (not certified school because the school but does not qualify) for control of a set of cross-cutting capacities in several business fields belonging to the corresponding eg to the six or seven agreements in inter- debate today (communication, education and culture, energy, transport, ...) to go beyond the conventional fragmentation - a wage level corresponding level of proven capabilities, for example, in a hierarchy of skills 1 to 4 corresponding to a salary scale of 1 to 5, a first level qualification with a salary starting at 2000 euros net per month, a second level with a salary starting at 4000 euros, a third level starting salary of 6000 euros and a fourth-level starting salary of 8000 euros for a wage hierarchy from 2000 to 10000 euros net. - A network of peers to be permanently socialized within the scope of the qualification for which it holds, for example, a professional association, a network of local actors, an international network specialists, who are the support of trade, services, enactment of rules of practice and their control, sharing of tools, training, recovery activities of individual members. - The right to a representative institution to enforce its rights to respect and progression of their qualification. Qualification (and therefore the salary that goes with it) is an attribute of the person, it can not be withdrawn and it can only grow in life. The personal qualification is the opposite of career security, leaving the bare minimum rights transferred to employment the person because it is the rights associated with certain secure mobility of workers to constantly prove their "employability" (savings accounts for training, pensions, health coverage, the right to reclassification ). She is also the opposite of universal income. Universal income (within the meaning of universal distribution of a package of higher or lower depending on the project level, say between the RMI and the SMIC) has provided people as bearers of needs that could be for a first stage, financed by the income of a collective heritage that the state is the guardian and on which everyone has a right to draw. In this endorsement of an institution as fundamental as capital property profit, revenue Universal adds that, "first check, lump, constitutive of individual resources, it calls a" second check ", according to the contribution of individual production and thus will strengthen the workforce and work ethic. Universal income is wages and universal antagonist, who delivers us from the labor market, the disqualification of producers posed as beings with needs, the fiction of income, employment and value of the property for profit.

We measure how the personal qualification is creative equal. It removes the labor market and thus the subordination of job seekers to employers, it makes everyone access to the status of joint holder of a qualification and salary related thereto. It unifies the top claims of retirees, students, civil servants, the unemployed, the entertainment, private sector employees, including those of very small (very small) and all the deserts union of independent workers. In particular, it can take action to promote the public by claiming the extension to all employees the distinction between rank and position, which means for all, recognition of qualifications, lack of unemployment, individual control of mobility. As it is true that the production of all goods and all services should be provided by employees released from employment and merchandise!

11. The need for a strong vision of the institution itself as wage policy

It is time to leave the conventional discourse of wages found to labor remuneration subject. Fight argument Reform is impossible without a strong vision of wages as a political institution that enriches citizenship by assigning each person a personal qualification and the financing of the wage economy. We join together in an entirely different perspective than full employment. Our qualification and hence our wage should no longer depend on employers' decisions on the labor market. Nostalgia for the good job is not good adviser to help us cope with the processing jobs in jobs that operating the reform. Overcoming the reform will not happen in a return to true full employment.

Because we have something better to do than to revive the progressive phase of the job when, in the late 1970s, it was the matrix of wage socialized because it was the exorbitant price of subordination to the employers.

It is not "secure" the condition of workers. The vocabulary of security has internalized the fact that in capitalism the social workers are minors: they are disqualified as producers, and they are entitled not to the direction of the economy but to income security and the employment. The issue of pensions, It is precisely out of the claim of income security and employment to promote a new figure of the worker to support our common aspiration to run the economy and finally out of the economy of labor value .

Qualification is thus an attribute that enriches political citizenship, as well as the right to vote. Just as universal suffrage has opened to each age of majority politics and founded the first stage of citizenship, universal qualification open to everyone age of majority and pay an extension based qualitative citizenship.

(March 10, 2010)