It is very complicated to find your way around the amount of pensions.
Indeed, retirees receive a basic pension (CNAV) or a state pension(civil servants) (or a bit of both for those who have worked in the
private and public sectors), and one or more supplementary pensions, the
calculation bases of which are different, not to mention of course the
special schemes. You will tell me that it is enough to add all that up,
except that, fortunately, Big Brother is not yet completely there, so we
know the amount of pensions and retirement benefits, the amount of
supplementary benefits, but we do not know how to say for a given
bracket of basic retirement income how much supplementary pension should
be added. The Pensions Advisory Council (COR), the organization that
tries to manage all this, is reduced to presenting "typical cases" to
try to see things clearly, typical cases that it itself recognizes are
not able to indicate their representativeness.
Since the basic pension and the pension are based on our contributions,
high salaries mean high pensions, low salaries mean low pensions. But
for equal salaries, there is no equal pension, because of the
differences in social security systems and supplementary pensions. And
it should also be remembered that bonuses do not count towards
retirement. So for example in the civil service, civil servants without
many bonuses, generally therefore low-level civil servants, have a
better replacement rate (1) than senior civil servants for whom bonuses
represent a larger part of their remuneration.
Everyone says that the civil service pension is more advantageous than
the private sector pension. It is not so obvious. In particular, the
private sector's supplementary pensions are much higher than those in
the public sector. The DREES (statistical department of the Ministry of
Labor) tried to measure the difference by simulating what pension a
civil servant would have had if he or she had worked in the private
sector for the same salary. 62% of sedentary civil servants born in 1958
would benefit from having the private sector's rules applied to them,
32% would lose out and 6% would see their pension unchanged to within
plus or minus 1%. The ratio between the average pension of women and
that of men, in the field of single pensioners with a full career, was
in 2021 86% for civil servants, 88% for territorial and hospital civil
servants and 87% for those insured under other special schemes, compared
to 71% for employees covered by the general scheme and 62% for the
self-employed. We must pay attention to all the words. These are women
who have had a full career. Until a few years ago, many women did not
have a full career because they stopped when they had young children.
Then they started again in poor conditions. So the retirement gap
between men and women is much greater than that. Women earned on average
42% less than men in 2012. The same year, the salary gap between men and
women was "only" 30% (20% in full-time equivalent). In total, that year,
445,000 women over 75 (14.1%) lived below the poverty line compared to
175,000 men (8.9%). In fact, the replacement rate is higher for low
incomes than for high incomes. A manager has a replacement rate if he
leaves at the age of entitlement of around 53%, a non-manager of 78%.
But if the non-executive has been unemployed (a relatively common
case!), their replacement rate is only 69%. For the categories who have
the right to retire early, their pension is also lower, since it is
prorated, that is to say it is calculated by removing the missing
quarters. What is the point of having the right to retire early in this
case, you might say? Simple, no reduction is applied. The reduction is
what is removed in addition, approximately 6% per missing year (the
calculation is more complicated than that, it would be a shame
otherwise). For example, if you have contributed 161 quarters instead of
169, you will receive 161/169 of the pension (that is the prorating) -
approximately 12% (that is the reduction). To no longer be affected by
the reduction, you must work until the age limit (which, I believe, has
remained at 67).
It is actually very complicated to go into detail and find the real
state of inequalities. Indeed, it is not only the amount of the pension
that counts. First, all these figures are calculated for a full-time
career, that is to say without interruptions and without part-time work.
This is less and less the case for the general population. On the other
hand, it is increasingly the case for women who now have on average a
career as long as men (in other words, they no longer stop for
children). But among today's retirees, there is still among the oldest
the generation of housewives who only receive a survivor's pension, and
also the generation of women who have worked with interruptions. Then,
among wealthy households, many take out life insurance and other
retirement savings plans. These are private banking products that are
therefore not included in the statistics I am talking about. Which means
that it is not certain that the income of senior executives will drop
that much when they retire.
Finally, there is one last major inequality: the inequality in life
expectancy. On average, executives live 7 years longer than workers.
They therefore receive their pension for significantly longer... Not to
mention health inequalities: being reduced to a state of dependency or
being able to enjoy your retirement are not the same thing. In 2022,
life expectancy without disability at birth is 65.3 years for women and
63.8 years for men (figures from the ministry). To compare with the
retirement ages...
Let's retrace the changes in very broad strokes. Throughout the first
half of the 20th century, old age rhymed with poverty (except for the
bourgeoisie of course). This is the situation that the establishment of
a pension system remedied. This system took time to have its full
effect. Those who retired up until the 1970s had not contributed enough
to receive a full pension. Today, overall, retirees earn a little more
than the average population but a little less than working people, and
their poverty rate is lower. The survivor's pension (2) put an end to
the great poverty of widows. When Mitterrand lowered the retirement age
to 60, the life expectancy (3) of a worker was 61. After the crisis of
the 1970s, we started to talk about the "new poor": this was a term used
to describe poverty that was not traditional, meaning that these poor
were not necessarily old people. Since then, a reform has reduced the
purchasing power of all retirees: pensions are no longer indexed to the
general increase in wages, but to inflation. It is difficult to find the
effects of recent pension reforms in the figures: among the mass of
retirees, many retired before. And many things have changed. For
example, women mostly reach retirement with a full career, the working
life span of men has decreased, career breaks due to unemployment have
become commonplace... To take a real look at inequalities and what the
reforms have changed, we would need studies that are not funded, to have
figures that are not provided to us, and possibly that do not exist. But
it is certain that the situation of the mass of retirees will deteriorate.
Main source: Conseil d'Orientation des Retraites, annual report,
Evolutions and perspectives of pensions in France, June 2024. Available
free of charge on the internet.
Notes
(1) The replacement rate is the percentage that the pension represents
in relation to our last year of activity.
(2) Half of the pension is paid to the spouse, in fact more often to the
surviving spouse. But be careful comrades, to benefit from it you must
be married!
(3) Life expectancy is the average length of life.
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4275
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten