Official start of the pension reform. The Government presents this Tuesday its reform of the pension system. In addition to the postponement of the retirement age to 64 years, certain special pension plans are also in the Executive’s sights. But specifically, what are special diets and who benefits from them today?
• What are special diets?
Social Security is organized into “four blocks”. The general scheme (private sector workers and self-employed workers) covers the majority of French workers, to which are added the agricultural scheme and the scheme for non-self-employed and non-agricultural workers (artisans, merchants, liberal professions, etc. ). .). What remains are the “special schemes” linked to certain professions or certain companies: this category includes the schemes existing before the creation of Social Security in 1946 and which have been maintained up to the present.
In a few words: the rules regarding Social Security are not the same for the people who depend on these special regimes. While some schemes also cover health or work accident insurance, most are retirement oriented. Most of the time, the main advantage for your beneficiaries lies in retirement before the legal age. Some also offer a shorter contribution period to obtain a full pension. But let’s not generalize: each special diet has its own conditions.
• Who benefits from these special regimes?
In practice, there is not really a clear definition: there are civil servants, employees of public companies or former public companies, but also employees of certain branches of the private sector such as notaries or mines. The Labor Code recognizes ten special regimes; the Social Security Accounts Commission lists many more: by integrating civil servants into the list, we climbed to 27 special regimes. In a broad sense, there are more than 5 million direct pensioners.
Strictly speaking, if we talk about the ten special retirement regimes recognized by the Labor Code, we find the RATP and the SNCF, the electricity and gas industry (EDF, Engie, RTE, Enedis, etc.), sailors, minors, office workers and employees of notaries, the Banque de France, the Paris Opera, the Comédie-Française and the Autonomous Port of Strasbourg. To which can be added State workers, State officials and military (FPE), territorial and hospital officials (FPT-FPH) as well as ministers of worship (priests, among others).
Of course, be careful: not all employees of these branches or companies are necessarily affected by the special regimes. In the RATP, for example, the special pension regime applies only to legal agents and not to employees with an indefinite contract under private law; furthermore, early retirement only affects certain categories of personnel, such as drivers or station agents. On the part of the SNCF, new railway workers can no longer claim early retirement.
• What are the conditions for retirement?
Each special regime works according to its own rules, but retirement generally occurs before the age of 60. The average retirement age is 60 years for employees in the electricity and gas industries, 56.81 years at the RATP, 61 years and 9 months at the Banque de France and 48 years for dancers at the Opéra de Paris. The contribution period is also sometimes shorter: a full pension requires 168 quarters in the RATP, compared to 172 quarters in the general scheme. The retirement pension calculation method may also be more advantageous.
But these advantages sometimes fade over time, because certain special regimes have already begun to move closer to the general regime. The retirement age in the RATP, for example, increases from generation to generation: all employees born after 1962 will retire at age 62. In addition, the number of special regimes continues to decrease, there were more than one hundred in 1945. Some will cease automatically when the last beneficiaries disappear, such as the former employees of Seita, the former public company in charge of tobacco production.
Source: BFM TV
