So we had to cancel our trip to Dijon due to the strikes. We got our money back from the train company (SBB) as we booked from Switzerland.

Sorry, France, but you really need to raise the retirement age and work like the rest of us.

Why though. Raising the retirement age is working out so well for the rest of us </sarcasm>
Tell me, kleeblatt: are you retired now, or are you still working?

I'm sorry about your trip Kleebatt, but I am glad you are not out of pocket because of it.

Why though? Because if people want a decent pension someone has to pay for it, and there aren't enough young people to do that. Same here. DH retired at the Dutch retirement age (then 65 and 3 months), because that's what his contract said he had to do, and then went back to work on the following Monday.
My pension date keeps vanishing over the horizon.

A friend who is a police officer thought he'd be retired by now and living in the sun. Instead, at the age of nearly 65 he is still working, still doing shifts, still working weekends and holidays, still dealing with terrible traffic accidents, drugs criminals, and everything else he has faced all his working life. Another year and a bit to go, if he lasts that long.

The French voted for Macron, they knew what he planned, and most people accept it, but a few vocal unions, always the same vocal unions, hold the country to ransom time after time and behave like babies who had their sweeties taken away. France is a mess and they are doing nothing to help. France being a mess threatens the whole EU. Look what happened to Greece with its liberal retirement ages and rubbish economy.

It's impossible to keep retirement at 65 and expect pensions to stay the same.
Look at life expectancy on 'our world in data' in 1950 and today.
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy

1) Those people all negotiated pay packets with certain terms. If you want to change one aspect you need to change them all. People act like those pensions are somehow gifts. French workers gave up other things to receive those pensions.

2) French workers pay what 15% of income into the plan? Where has all that money gone? The government set that rate. They agreed to pay the pensions. If the government can't manage they should give back all the contributions paid until now. If the government was managing that money wisely they wouldn't need to change the terms.

It's curious how the same sort of people that would never dare change a contract in any other instance think it's okay to steal from workers.

State pension payments pay for the current pensions, not your future pension, which will rely on the payment made by the people working then.
Interests rates in Europe are at record lows. One of DH's work pensions has not be indexed for several years, affectively cutting the pension, and next year it may actually be cut. Luckily it is not our sole pension. All pension funds in Europe are struggling because of the low interest rates. Some are on negative interest!

Let's say you start working at age 20 and pay 15% of your earnings into a pension fund. When you retire at age 52, you have a life expectancy of age 85. (It's greater than life expectancy at birth, because you've outlived those first 52 years of risk.) How much pension do you think your own contributions would pay?

I'm sure the French government would be delighted to return the contributions if the rail workers would accept them in lieu of the pension.

I don't know the specifics of the French system, but as hetismij says, pensions are paid by the current taxpayers.
If you want to save for you own additional pension, by putting money away while you work, you can of course do that, but there is very little tax incentive to do so. In Belgium you can save an additional 1250 euro per year towards your pension, with a tax credit of 317 euro. With 0% interest rates, that is not going to get you very far if you want to live on that for more than 20 years after your retiremnt.
The state pension in Belgium is 100% paid by the current taxpayers. There is no reserve to cover an aging population.

This is the real problem with pensions in developed countries. This system worked after a fashion when the number of taxpayers was far greater than the number of pensioners. Now, with falling birthrates, longer life expectancy, and (in some countries) higher unemployment or underemployment, state pension funds are incurring deep deficits. Add in the persistently low interest rates mentioned by Hetismej, the stagnation of wages, and there's big trouble ahead for pensions.

Here is the French government's plan:
(Raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, etc.)

Here are the main details of the plan:

• One pension system instead of 42 currently
• Benefits indexed to wages, not inflation
• New regime applies to everyone born from the start of 1975
• Those who are born from 2004 will only contribute to the new system
• Legal retirement age unchanged at 62, full benefits not available until age 64
• Retirement age rises to 64 from 2027
• Minimum pension of 1,000 euros a month from 2022 for those who worked a full career
• Minimum pension pegged at at least 85% of the minimum wage
• Workers earning more then 120,000 euros a year will pay extra
• Those who started work before 18 and those with “hardship” jobs, including night workers and nurses, will still be able to retire with full pension at 62
• Prison guards, police officers and firefighters will keep their special regimes

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...orce-from-2025

Still working and have nine years to go.

My pension age is currently 66 and 10 months, but it could change to later before I get there.
The French scheme is hardly a hardship for most (all) people, they just like to complain and strike at any excuse.