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French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

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Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#711

Post by p4bl0 »

mmarq wrote: post #680
retinaros wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the system IS sustained. the main white collar one even generates profits. increase the salaries that will increase money being sent to retirement funds and it won’t be a problem anymore. france income per capita has been the same for the past 20 years. they are stealing our wages to make us slaves and they blame us for not working enough. christine lagarde pushed for blocking wage rise in the EU, european commission…

You can’t increase salaries de jure and even if it were possible, it’s not clear how the governor of the ECB would be able to pass laws.

> You can’t increase salaries de jure

The law defines the minimum legal wage. History has shown that increasing the minimum wage generally quickly end up increasing all salaries.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#712

Post by luckylion »

wdb wrote: post #704
retinaros wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the system IS sustained. the main white collar one even generates profits. increase the salaries that will increase money being sent to retirement funds and it won’t be a problem anymore. france income per capita has been the same for the past 20 years. they are stealing our wages to make us slaves and they blame us for not working enough. christine lagarde pushed for blocking wage rise in the EU, european commission…

How's the European Commission not elected? You vote a government in your country and they than select the commissioner for this commission.

That's indirect at best. The government also decides who it sends as ambassadors to foreign countries, but would you say that ambassadors are elected?

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#713

Post by sokoloff »

RestlessMind wrote: post #637
amunicio wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should middle class in the West vote to allow outsourcing to cheaper countries? Because you can run but you can't hide. If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive. Hence, you will require even more protectionist policies, that in turn will make you even more uncompetitive. In the end, you will have higher prices for lower quality domestic products. I don't like gravity, bu…

> If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive less competitive against whom? If West had not shipped its factories to China, I am sure West would have still stayed competitive against China by miles. In fact, by shipping its technical know-how for manufacturing, West has allowed China to become more competitive. > I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump…

In the 1960s, US auto-makers appeared content to make crappy, unreliable cars until Japanese imports (also crappy at first) came in and improved quickly, putting pressure on the domestics to also improve.

Consumers have vastly benefited from that competition, far in excess of any losses from the domestic automaker labor group.

It’s not entirely voluntary, but if you want to see what protectionism and economic isolation will bring, go visit Cuba. Then hop over to Grand Cayman, Grand Bahama, or Puerto Rico to see what being more integrated but competitive has to offer.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#714

Post by p4bl0 »

sneed-oil wrote: post #686
makeitdouble wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By increasing everybody's salaries, it seems likely to me the cost of goods and services would go up by virtue of inflation. But then everybody's salary stagnating hasn't made the cost of goods stagnate. There's no such simple and direct link between the two.

Maybe the cost of imported goods has gone up

It has, partly. But a part of the inflation at least in France/Europe is also due to big corp choosing to increase prices because they can (since "there is inflation"). For example Unilever has distributed very high dividends (€19B, for a total turnover of €80B, that's almost a quarter of their total revenue going directly towards to their shareholders while their workers and consumers see nothing), while the numerous products the company sells (which are mostly daily usage food and sanitary products) have seen their prices skyrocket "because of the inflation".

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#715

Post by realusername »

p4bl0 wrote: post #710
realusername wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system ISN'T sustained, not even the most optimistic scenario supports your argument. And funneling even more money into it like you want to isn't an option, the GDP proportion dedicated to retirement increased a lot already. You've seen the low salary but you didn't understand the cause of that, the cause of that is the money is being funneled to the retirement system.

Literally everything you said is false. The COR (Conseil d'orientation des retraites) has 4 working scenarios and only a single one of them has the retirement system going temporarily into the negatives. The situation is not alarming at all. In addition, there are a lot of solutions that have been on the table to help the retirement system do even better and allow people to retire earlier (for example paying women th…

Every single scenario in the COR is negative for a long time, people should stop lying about it to comfort their political leanings. And it's not like it's for short time either, the worst scenario has a negative forecast for the next 45 years. The figures are terrible, regardless of your opinion.

Secondly, 14% of GDP is massive, workers have been paying more and more towards the retirement system, salaries did increase a lot already, it's just that all of the increase went towards retirement

> The elderly have to be supported one way or another.

Nice way to avoid the fact that France spends a lot of money towards high retirement salaries which don't need it. Additionally low salaries live less longer, making the system even more injust.

The way to fix it and transform it into a social system is to tax the high retirements for the benefit of the workers. In a social system the money should go towards the people who need it the most and not the opposite, France's retirement system isn't a social system anymore.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#716

Post by realusername »

p4bl0 wrote: post #711
mmarq wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t increase salaries de jure and even if it were possible, it’s not clear how the governor of the ECB would be able to pass laws.

> You can’t increase salaries de jure The law defines the minimum legal wage. History has shown that increasing the minimum wage generally quickly end up increasing all salaries.

History has also shown that it leads to higher unemployment and lower growth of the salaries above it.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#717

Post by pixelfarmer »

lordnacho wrote: post #10

The way retirement is done was broken from the start. If you have a fixed age, you will get issues when the population pyramid changes and fewer people are around to support the retired. What the system ought to be is: 1) Everyone who can't work gets a pension/state support/whatever you want to call it. If you get run over by a car at 25, you are on this list until you die and the state supports you. It's expensive,…

The system is broken, yes, but not how you think. Automation and how automation benefits society (or actually not) is the core issue. "Population bomb" discussions, both in terms of how old people get and population age distribution are just straw man arguments for the much larger underlying issue.

I currently live in Germany, like about half of the population is in the age group that is allowed to work. About 1/4th of these work at minimum wage, and I would wager a guess that up to about another 1/4th is either officially declared "unemployed" (the official definition of that gets regularly messed with, guess why) or in a state every normal would declare "unemployed" one way or another.

On the other hand you have massive automation everywhere, but taxes for companies are totally different to taxes for people, and the basic idea of retirement is that the current production output is paying the retirement for the current old people. From a large scale view on this it shouldn't be an issue for Germany, but they face similar issues like France and sticking through the status quo doesn't leave many options in the end with a system like that.

And yes, it obviously is larger scale, because as you see, it is not just retired people affected by the problem, it is everyone, kids included (their parents being the proxy).

Now think about how multinational corpos use nation states for their own benefits and other such stuff and you see that where things are currently heading on the larger scale is actually the worst possible option to fix anything, it just speeds this entire process up towards the breaking point. For all this "intelligence" humans supposed to have, this whole thing is a terrible joke.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#718

Post by sokoloff »

joe_the_user wrote: post #361
vkou wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and in a globalised world where most of the goods are made in countries where salaries are rising as well as inflation, blocking our wages is only sending us to the third world . Just throwing this out here, but in a globalized world, by what mechanism would one expect Europeans and Americans will be able to enjoy a greater standard of living than people in, say, Asia? Are they somehow smarter? More productive? In…

Just throwing this out here, but in a globalized world, by what mechanism would one expect Europeans and Americans will be able to enjoy a greater standard of living than people in, say, Asia? The world standard of living should be equalized globally but it should be the present first world standard, not the present third world standard. This is certainly possible given increasing world productive capacities.

The present first-world standard is enabled in large part by the present spread in costs of production (roughly: wages) in other areas.

Certainly the phone you’re using and almost certainly the clothes you’re wearing were not made by people making a median Western wage.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#719

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

RestlessMind wrote: post #637
amunicio wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why should middle class in the West vote to allow outsourcing to cheaper countries? Because you can run but you can't hide. If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive. Hence, you will require even more protectionist policies, that in turn will make you even more uncompetitive. In the end, you will have higher prices for lower quality domestic products. I don't like gravity, bu…

> If you institute protectionist policies, you will in turn become less competitive less competitive against whom? If West had not shipped its factories to China, I am sure West would have still stayed competitive against China by miles. In fact, by shipping its technical know-how for manufacturing, West has allowed China to become more competitive. > I don't like gravity, but it doesn't mean I can ignore it and jump…

>Sure, but outsourcing is nothing like gravity. It is a mixture of greed on part of corporations to reduce labor costs, naivete on behalf of politicians who thought China and others would welcome Western values along with Western jobs and stupidity on part of voters who traded short term cheap junk for long term stable jobs.

Agreed. Fundamentally, if you want to institute protectionist policies for labour, you also need capital controls to prevent all your businesses from exporting their operations to avoid these policies.

Re: French workers protest plan to increase retirement age

#720

Post by p4bl0 »

realusername wrote: post #715
p4bl0 wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally everything you said is false. The COR (Conseil d'orientation des retraites) has 4 working scenarios and only a single one of them has the retirement system going temporarily into the negatives. The situation is not alarming at all. In addition, there are a lot of solutions that have been on the table to help the retirement system do even better and allow people to retire earlier (for example paying women th…

Every single scenario in the COR is negative for a long time, people should stop lying about it to comfort their political leanings. And it's not like it's for short time either, the worst scenario has a negative forecast for the next 45 years. The figures are terrible, regardless of your opinion. Secondly, 14% of GDP is massive, workers have been paying more and more towards the retirement system, salaries did incre…

The president of the COR itself disagrees with you: https://www.francetvinfo.fr/economie/retraite/reforme-des-re...

> 14% of GDP is massive

That's very subjective, and even someone agreeing to call it "massive" could not necessarily see a problem with that, if we can afford it (which it seems, we can).

> Additionally low salaries live less longer, making the system even more injust.

That's a good point. And the reform Macron is trying to pass will make this even worse: low salaries live less longer and are already dead or in very bad health by the time they can retire (and a big part cannot even work up to that age). Making the minimum retirement age two years later will greatly increase this injustice: most low salaries will contribute their whole life to pay for the pensions of the richer who actually still have living time in good health after they retire.

Concerning the high retirement salaries and the necessity to tax them more, I mostly agree. But that's not at all what Macron's reform is about.

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