International Desk: French President Emmanuel Macron has signed into law his government’s highly unpopular pension reforms, which raise the state pension age from 62 to 64, reports BBC. <\/p>\n
It happened hours after France’s top constitutional body cleared the change.<\/p>\n
The Constitutional Council rejected opposition calls for a referendum – but it also struck out some aspects of the reforms, citing legal flaws.<\/p>\n
Following the council’s ruling, protesters set fires across Paris and 112 people were arrested.<\/p>\n
Twelve days of demonstrations have been held against the reforms since January.<\/p>\n
Unions have vowed to continue opposing the reforms, and called on workers across France to return to the streets on 1 May.<\/p>\n
President Macron argues the reforms are essential to prevent the pension system collapsing. In March, the government used a special constitutional power to force through the changes without a vote.<\/p>\n
He signed the reforms into law in the early hours of Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
The Labour Minister Olivier Dussopt has said he expects the reforms to come into effect by the start of September.<\/p>\n
After the Friday ruling of the Constitutional Court, trade unions made an unsuccessful last-ditch appeal to the president not to sign the pension-age increase into law.<\/p>\n
The unions pointed out that six concessions that had been added to the reforms were rejected by the court, so what was already unfair was now “even more unbalanced”.<\/p>\n
Among the reforms struck down by the nine members of the Constitutional Council was a so-called “senior index” aimed at urging companies with more than 1,000 workers to take on employees over 55.<\/p>\n
Mr Dussopt has vowed to improve the employment rates of those aged over 50 in an effort to ease concerns about the financial impacts of the raised retirement age.<\/p>\n
The authorities had banned demonstrations in front of the Constitutional Council building in Paris until Saturday morning, but crowds of protesters had gathered nearby on Friday and the ruling was met with jeers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
International Desk: French President Emmanuel Macron has signed into law his government’s highly unpopular pension reforms, which raise the state pension age from 62 to 64, reports BBC. It happened hours after France’s top constitutional body cleared the change. The Constitutional Council rejected opposition calls for a referendum – but it also struck out some aspects of the reforms, citing legal flaws. Following the council’s ruling, protesters set fires across Paris and 112 people were arrested. Twelve days of demonstrations have been held against the reforms since January. Unions have<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30873,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[30,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30872"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30872"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30875,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30872\/revisions\/30875"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.banglanewsus.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}