France launches Bill to Raise Retirement Age

PARIS (AFP) - French government on Tuesday formally launched plans to raise the retirement age from 62 to 60, a sweeping overhaul the pensions system, the labor unions have vowed to fight.

Program is the centerpiece of President Nicolas Sarkozy's reform agenda, as he eyes a Peter Semneby bid 2012 was, but it has been overshadowed by a great political funding scandal that hit his Labour Minister Eric Woerth.

Program, the French workers will have to pay contributions for a longer period, and some new taxes would be imposed on high income earners and capital gains to help plug a gaping hole in pensions funding.

The most controversial parts of the program will push back the minimum retirement age from 62 to 60 by 2018 and bringing pub sector pension plans in line with the private sector.

Talk of raising retirement age is prohibited in France, where the right to stop working to age 60 is already fixed in 1982, one of the main legacies of Socialist President Francois Mitterrand.

Sarkozy said Monday he is ready to discuss the bill with some measures, trade unions, however, that the 62 year target and expand the public sector, employee contributions will remain.

"I say, 62 years, we will not support that," he said in a major television interview called the attempt to move out of Woerth scandal.

"I think I am telling you, equality, the state and private contributions, the question of justice. The rest, we must be open to hear what our colleagues say the talks, he said.

The program prompts mass street protests last month and are working unions promised further action, when the Parliament discussed it in September.

"I expect demonstrations. I know that people are suffering. What can I do to be a difference in our minds what is right. No amount of protests, "Sarkozy said.

Woerth's presentation of the bill in Tuesday's cabinet meeting is particularly sensitive time, after a scandal linked to the fate of France's richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt.

Adoption of the report cleared Woerth on charges that he helped Bettencourt avoid taxes, but other probes into his affairs are examined, and he is also accused of illegal campaign financing and conflicts of interest.

On Tuesday, he must submit his official pension bill to the government, which is planned to establish it and pass it to Parliament debate in September. Sarkozy predicted that shall be voted on the law soon after that.

Reforms aimed at helping the government meet its deficit targets announced three percent of GDP in 2013. Woerth says he aims to balance the books and to achieve a "zero deficit" in his scheme of pensions by 2018.

France's largest union, CGT, said the government go back to the drawing board and come up another program, calling it "flagrant injustice" that the reforms put a burden on workers.

Jean-Claude Mailly, head of the Union forces Ouvriere, has branded the bill "socially unjust and economically inefficient.

Like many other European countries, France faces a funding shortfall in his pension plan due to the growing older population and fewer working age people to pay contributions.

Deficit is going to reach 45 billion euros in 2020, and may reach between 72 and 115 billion euros in 2050, according to French COR pensions advisory board.

French workers average retire at a younger age than most of their counterparts in Europe and the proposed changes still left them with one of the lowest retirement age on the continent.