Sacrebleu!

So much of France has been forcibly shut down over the past couple of weeks by massive strikes over the proposed raising of the retirement age from 60 to 62, or so one would think by the reportage of the NZ media.

As I've complained about before, the press here in Aotearoa tend to talk about strikes in terms of the disruption they cause and the emotive rhetoric of the strike leaders - only giving the briefest description of the overall issue/s which are disputed.

In the case of the French strikes as with others, this lack of specificity paints the strikers as overreactive whiners and gives them little chance of gaining public support.

Oh no, you have to wait 'till you're 62 to retire now? Poor diddums! Those damned Cheese Eating Surrender Monkeys, they'll agitate over anything. Remember the riots in 2005?

However, if you look past the headlines, you'll find the changes are to raise the minimum retirement age to 62, and to raise the "normal retirement age for public pensions" from 65 to 67. So the problem isn't having to wait 'till you're 62 to retire, it's that you have to wait 'till you're 67 to get your public pension. Now that makes the protest a little more reasonable, doesn't it?

Unfortunately both NZ and international media have made a clear decision in their reporting of the dispute, choosing to focus on the retirement age change rather than that of the pension age. As per always, this slant downgrades the percieved legitimacy of the industrial action. Sigh.