Why I love and deplore the French welfare state
‘Paying towards world-class healthcare and the Métro makes me feel there’s a moral purpose to my working life’
Early in the French transport strike, I went into a Parisian hospital for a minor operation. I lay on a stretcher in a cramped pre-op room among a dozen or so men and women, each of us wearing only a backless paper hospital gown. An orderly walked in and gaped at the crush: “It’s like the Métro here!”
In fact, the Métro is worse. The few trains still running are jam-packed, as the rail workers’ strike over pensions enters its second month. Suburban trains are worse still: commuters can spend an hour shuffling through dangerously overcrowded stations just to reach the platform. (The strike is an almost entirely Parisian phenomenon. Most people in other French regions drive to work or use public transport run by private companies, whose employees aren’t striking.)
Ostensibly, the strike opposes Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to reform pensions and end the “special regimes” that allow some workers to retire early (including train drivers at age 52). But as with the gilets jaunes’ protests, there’s a deeper issue at stake: the French welfare state.
Rightwing foreign critics think that the French state, from trains to hospitals, needs shrinking. French leftists think Macron is shrinking it too much. After 18 years in Paris, I disagree with both sides: I both love and deplore the French system.
I’m very familiar with the leftwing narrative, because I live on the boulevard where protest marches are held. During a march last month, a communist bookshop set up literally on our doorstep. In the French left’s view, Macron is Thatcher reincarnated, a neoliberal ex-banker trying to deprive French workers of their traditional right to a long third age of wine, yoga and boules.
The problem with this narrative is that France today is about as far as any society gets from a neoliberal wasteland. In 2018, after Macron’s first year of reforms, French government spending was still 56 per cent of gross domestic product, the highest for any country in the OECD, the rich-nation club.
Moreover, French pensions are now longer than ever before. In 1970 — the zenith of the postwar decades remembered here as les trente glorieuses, “the glorious thirty” — the effective average age of retirement was 67. The average life expectancy for French men (who made up the vast majority of the workforce back then) was 68.
Today, the effective French average retirement age is just 60.8, or 4.5 years below the OECD average, while life expectancy has reached 83, according to OECD data. French lifespans have been rising by about two years a decade, so even if Macron manages to raise the legal age for a full pension from 62 to 64, there’ll still be time for boules. As the writer Sylvain Tesson says, exaggerating only slightly: “France is a paradise inhabited by people who think they’re in hell.”
This near-paradise is funded by taxes. Many poorer workers pay a hefty slice of their incomes in social charges. Gilets jaunes protesting about their weak purchasing power and workers marching for their pensions are two sides of the same coin: the former are funding the latter’s retirements.
If the leftwing narrative about France is unconvincing, so is the rightwing one. This says that France needs a Thatcher to “tame” unions and slash the state. In fact, the unions have done a lot to help France maintain its relatively low inequality and generous welfare state. Crush unions, and the more isolated French regions might end up as deprived as post-Thatcherite northern England.
I say this as someone who pays more than half my income to the French state. On the one hand, this mildly disincentivises me from doing extra paid work. On the upside, it’s oddly relaxing: since there is little point maximising your earnings here, you can devote your life to something more interesting.
At the risk of sounding insane, paying towards world-class universal healthcare and the construction of 68 Métro stations in Paris’s suburbs (Europe’s biggest public-transport project) makes me feel there’s some moral purpose to my working life. I’m especially happy to pay because I owe the French welfare state.
In 2011, my wife was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer. We walked through the hospital courtyard discussing how I’d raise our children if she died. A fantastic Parisian hospital saved her. I’d like everyone to have such good care. However, I’m not happy to pay for train drivers to retire at 52.
Much of the left-v-right argument about France is based on a false dichotomy. The notion is that either France retains the imagined big-state paradise of the trente glorieuses or it embraces le capitalisme anglo-saxon red in tooth and claw. But there’s a third alternative: the social democracy of France’s northern European neighbours, where strong trade unions almost never need to strike because they work together with the state and business.
Once at a conference I watched the main Dutch union leader and the head of the employers’ federation chatting at their own breakfast table like old mates. When that becomes the norm here, France really will be paradise.