Only 44 percent of 60-64 year-olds are employed in France. This figure is not a demographic accident. Bertrand Martinot and Franck Morel address taxation and pensions in Work Is the Solution (2025), a book that examines institutional choices affecting late-career activity. The question that emerges is not whether France can correct this outcome, but at what cost, and on what timeline.
The Essentials
- In France, 44% of 60-64 year-olds are employed, compared to 65-70% in Nordic countries (data from Gilbert Cette, 2026).
- This outcome stems from fiscal choices: French labor taxation is among the highest in the OECD for low and middle-income earners (OECD, Pensions at a Glance 2025).
- Martinot emphasizes the interaction between institutional rules and cultural perceptions around late career.
- Nordic countries have implemented reforms combining targeted relief, continuous training, and sectoral negotiation.
- If France does not modify this architecture before 2030, productivity gains linked to automation risk being captured by a narrow fraction of the active population, deepening the generational divide.
44%: A Figure That Doesn’t Happen by Accident
Let’s start with the raw facts. In Sweden, roughly 70% of 60-64 year-olds are employed. In Denmark, the United Kingdom, and Germany, the rate exceeds 60%. In France, it plateaus at 44%. The gap with the Nordic average represents several million potential workers outside the labor market, precisely when the question of pension financing dominates public debate.
This figure is not a cultural inevitability. French people do not have a genetic allergy to work after age 60. In the 1970s, before early retirement became an explicit state policy, rates of activity among French seniors were not so distant from their neighbors’. The divergence was constructed over fifty years through the accumulation of policies designed to push older workers out of the labor market. Economists have since demonstrated that this calculation rests on an error: jobs are not a fixed-size pie.
OECD data show that France’s employment rate for 60-64 year-olds is low in international comparison. Employer contributions remain high until retirement, with no gradual reduction beyond a certain age. Partial early retirement mechanisms, when they exist, remain complex and underused. And pension entitlements include a financial incentive to continue working after reaching full retirement status, notably through a bonus for working longer. The accounting result is predictable: for many employers, a 61-year-old employee costs as much as a 40-year-old and presents, in common perception, greater health risks or resistance to change.
Labor Taxation as a Negative Signal
The French fiscal-social wedge is documented by the OECD in Taxing Wages, while Pensions at a Glance 2025 publishes pension contribution rates. The fiscal wedge is the gap between what an employer pays out and what an employee actually receives. In France, this gap can exceed 45% for a median salary. For a 62-year-old employee considering staying on the job for two more years, this reality translates into simple terms: their cost to the company remains disproportionate compared to the signal sent by the system.
The Nordic comparison illustrates a different mechanism. Sweden has put in place transition support for employees in late career, documented by Swedish authorities. Denmark coupled this type of relief with a reform of continuous training, allowing workers aged 55 and over to access retraining programs financed by a fund pooled between employers and the state. The effects on company behavior take roughly a decade to manifest, but they are measurable. Rates of activity among seniors have risen in Sweden, according to official Swedish data.
Taxation sends a signal. And in France, that signal has long said: past 58, exiting is the reasonable solution.
The Cultural Lock Doesn’t Disappear With a Law
Martinot emphasizes a point that fiscal reformers often underestimate. Institutional architecture creates culture, but culture eventually becomes self-sustaining. Several decades of early retirement have produced a powerful social norm: in many French companies, 58 is seen as the beginning of the end of career, an age when one begins to “manage the exit” rather than invest in the person. This norm appears on both sides of the employment contract. Employers hesitate to train a 59-year-old employee on a new digital tool.
And employees themselves, lacking encouragement, rarely anticipate a second active phase of career beyond age 60.
The 2023 reform was accompanied by an increase in employment at a given age among the affected generations. However, the proportion of people neither employed nor retired increased at age 62 for these same generations, while this proportion is smaller at ages 60 and 61. According to Dares, the proportion of people neither employed nor retired is higher at age 62 among the generations affected by the 2023 reform.
This is precisely the gap between legal constraint and absence of supporting reform that Martinot diagnoses as the principal risk of a half-baked reform.
Measures Actually Adopted by Nordic Countries
The Nordic example is often invoked as self-evident. It deserves to be broken down, because results there were not achieved through a single measure. Nordic reforms rest on multiple dimensions.
The first lever is fiscal: targeted relief on employer contributions for employees in the second half of their career, designed to neutralize the perceived added cost. This relief targets companies that maintain or hire seniors, not those that exclude them.
The second is educational: a right to retraining financed on a pooled basis, accessible from age 55, covering digital, organizational, or sector-specific skills. In Sweden, support for transition and skills rests on public mechanisms and transition agencies, with access conditions. Investment in training for senior workers in Nordic countries is significantly higher than in France.
The third pillar is negotiated: major Nordic reforms were built through agreements between unions and employers, which gave them legitimacy that top-down reforms struggle to acquire. In France, social dialogue on senior employment remains fragmented and often blocked before sectoral negotiations begin.
Martinot and his critics agree on one point: Nordic countries rely on a tradition of flexicurity, contract flexibility, generous unemployment benefits, and massive investment in training, which France has not built. Transposing Swedish instruments into the French context will not automatically produce the same effects. This finding complicates the path without invalidating the direction.
A Competing Reading: Long-Term Work Without Strengthened Protection
Martinot’s thesis faces serious objection, raised by economists close to social institutionalism. Extending the activity of seniors without simultaneously tackling the quality of employment in late career risks keeping workers active under degraded conditions: physically demanding jobs, stagnant pay, limited autonomy. For construction workers, nursing assistants, or long-distance drivers, remaining active at 62 or 63 is not a neutral choice.
This objection is well-founded. Occupational strain intensifies from age 55 onward in manual trades and personal service work. Neglecting this reality leads to reforms that increase sick leave and disability in late career, with costs comparable to early departures.
Resolving this tension does not consist of choosing between fiscal reform and protection of working conditions. It requires combining them. Employer contribution relief for employees aged 60 and over can be conditioned on commitments regarding adapted positions, similar to what some German sectoral agreements have experimented with through “late-career trajectories” (Laufbahnmodelle) in industry. This is where French reform remains incomplete.
This subject is directly linked to another documented tension on this publication: automation creates new needs for technicians at precisely the moment when the most qualified seniors to lead these transitions are leaving the labor market.
The Effects of Automation on the Equation
The question of active seniors can no longer be read independently of the productive context in which it is embedded. Automation is advancing in industrial, logistics, and even service sectors. It produces real productivity gains. The question is who benefits from them.
If 56% of 60-64 year-olds are inactive, the base of contributors financing pensions shrinks. At the same time, productivity gains generated by automation are captured primarily by companies, in the form of margins, or by workers in employment best positioned to negotiate their salary. Retirees and inactive seniors are largely excluded, unless there is explicit redistribution. The compression of intermediate salaries by the minimum wage illustrates a related dynamic: productivity gains do not automatically trickle down the pay scale.
Therefore, two trajectories open up for the 2030-2040 decade.
In the first, France combines a reduction in the fiscal wedge for senior workers with massive investment in continuous training in the second half of career, on the Swedish model. The employment rate of 60-64 year-olds gradually converges toward 55 or 60%, broadening the contributor base and reducing pressure on younger workers. Automation gains, partially redistributed through universal rights to training, serve to finance career transitions rather than widen the gap between insiders and outsiders in the labor market. Inheritance as a growing determinant of wealth loses power if long-term employment expands the accumulation of social rights specific to each generation.
In the second, adjustments remain partial: contribution rates are marginally modified without cultural transformation or training investment. The employment rate of seniors stagnates around 45 to 50%. Automation productivity gains are captured by capital. Tension between workers and retirees intensifies as the dependency ratio, the number of retirees per worker, deteriorates. Future reforms proceed under constraint, each cohort leaving work at 60 reducing the pool of people whose behavior can still be modified.
Two signals will allow us to distinguish, by 2027 or 2028, which trajectory France is pursuing: the evolution of the employment rate of 60-64 year-olds over five years, and the share of productivity gains from automation redistributed as social rights or wage increases rather than corporate profit.
Conditions for Reform to Hold
The ingredients of a credible reform are known. Martinot documents them, the OECD validates them in its comparative publications, Nordic experiences illustrate them. Progressive relief on employer contributions for employees over 60, targeted at companies that maintain or hire seniors. A universal right to career transition in the second half of career, financed by a pooled portion of productivity gains. Sectoral agreements that define adapted trajectories for demanding occupations, combining work-time adjustment and maintenance of compensation.
And a transformation of the role of human resources in large companies, where 58 must cease to be seen as an exit horizon.
The difficulty is political as much as economic. Each of these measures creates winners and losers in the short term. Contribution relief costs money before generating additional contributors. Retraining training requires initial investment whose returns take five to ten years to materialize. And cultural transformation of perceptions around long-term work requires sustained political discourse, which neither the French left nor right has yet built coherently.
The window is not closed. But it is narrowing. Each cohort that leaves at 60 fixes the perceptions of the next one a bit more.
Sources
- Gilbert Cette, employment data for seniors in France 2026, Institut Montaigne / OFCE publications
- Bertrand Martinot, Work Is the Solution, 2025
- OECD, Pensions at a Glance 2025, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-pensions-at-a-glance-2025_a2a97c1a-en.html
- OECD, Employment Outlook 2026, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
- DARES, data on senior employment and situations of neither employment nor retirement, 2023-2025, Ministry of Labor
- CEPAL, Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean 2026, https://www.cepal.org/en/publications/90269-economic-survey-latin-america-and-caribbean-2026-growth-and-productivity-amid
