Yesterday, I was watching Morning Joe because, well, it’s my job and I have to. And they had this jovial segment about those crazy French, out in the streets protesting Macron’s pension reforms. They even had Richard Engel, a supposedly great journalist, reporting live from their May Day protest and saying it was “just” about the quality of life. These silly people, to complain about raising the retirement age from 62 to 64! Ha, ha! Sounds like a Monty Python skit!
I think I had a mini-stroke.
Do you know what the reforms do to women?
There is already a pension problem for French women. Raising the retirement age to 64 from 62 and the number of years workers must pay in from 42 to 43 to receive a full pension will make it even harder for women to qualify — women who, if they give birth, take a longer maternity leave than men and then frequently work part-time until the kids are older.
Women who were out of the workplace to raise children already have to work until 67 to meet the threshold for a full pension.
Macron’s response? Okay, we’ll let you count the parental leave for the pension, and we won’t raise your retirement age even higher!
How many of you have looked for work after 55? Easier said than done. This shit is complicated — far too complicated for America’s so-called journalists, certainly. And you know those movies about the “sophisticated” French couples, where the wife looks the other way while her husband’s cheating?
Maybe she just can’t afford to leave because her pension is too small. Ha, ha! Isn’t that funny?
