More and more French people are resorting to gradual retirement to begin to prepare more calmly for the end of their professional career and thus consider their retirement with appeasement. However, conditions are necessary in order to be able to benefit from it, while the pension reform must be implemented from September 1st. In this context, decrees are planned to clarify certain contours of the reform and in particular to clear up more or less vague areas on specific measures. What will happen to phased retirement?
The French appreciate gradual retirement and now believe that it is an appreciable alternative to withdrawing, little by little, from professional life. Thus, if you are at least 60 years old and you have 150 quarters in all your basic pension plans, you can claim progressive retirement. You will also need to perform one or more part-time activities in order to launch the device. In this context, you begin to receive part of your retirement, while contributing and continuing to work.
To calculate the amount of your progressive retirement, your pension fund uses your rights at the time of your request. Thus, the pension share paid depends on your working time. For example, if you embark on a 65% part-time job, you will be entitled to 35% of your pension. Depending on the changes made to the duration of your part-time work, the amount of your progressive retirement will also be gradually revised.
A new implementing text for the pension reform is soon to be implemented. While the law shifts the age of access to progressive retirement by two years, this will increase from 60 years and three months for people born from September 1961 or even 60 years and six months for those born in 1962.
According to this next publication, the conditions should not experience major changes for the private sector. However, it remains the obligation to obtain the employer’s agreement for part-time work. As Franck Morel, associate lawyer at Flichy Grangé reminds our colleagues from Ouest France, “in common law, the request must be sent six months before the date of entry into part-time work”. The employer is thus obliged to respond within three months before a limit reduced to two months for phased retirement.
At the level of civil servants, the number of quarters required also remains fixed at 150, according to the decree. The latter refers to “Article L612-1 of the Civil Service Code” and provides that “part-time cannot be less than half-time”. Access to part-time work could therefore, as a CGT trade unionist fears, “be at the discretion of the public employer”.
Faced with staffing problems in the Public Service, there would therefore be a major problem with the issue of part-time workers. As a representative of the FSU pointed out to Ouest-France, the essential risk here would be that this right does not go beyond the single “formal” stage.
