What do the French know that we don't?

In October, mass riots broke out in France as protesters objected to a government plan to raise the retirement age from 60 to 62. Commentators in this country sneered at the "pampered French" and rejoiced at the prospect that they would be subjected to additional years of toil.

In November, not to be outdone by Gallic suffering, a bipartisan commission appointed by President Obama to figure out how America might reduce its national debt recommended that the retirement age here be raised to 69. Gleeful commentators asked if our politicians would have the guts to demand of pampered Americans the sacrifices so clearly required.

Outgoing Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty displayed a similar attitude this month in a commentary for the Wall Street Journal, in which he suggested that public employees are among the most protected and well-paid workers in America. He was particularly bothered that those employees still had defined-benefit pension plans, as auto workers used to, and thus were too hoity-toity to retire into dumpsters and homeless shelters like the rest of us.

The verdict is in, the consensus is solid: The French aren't miserable enough yet, and neither are we. Did you think you might pile up an actual retirement fund, supplement it with Social Security, and ease into a decade or two of golfing in Florida as your parents did? How last-century of you. How quaint.

I happen to know -- never mind how -- that late at night for a certain period in 1971, or maybe '72, a television station in San Jose, Calif., broadcast a series of mock public-service announcements featuring Carol Doda, headline stripper at the Condor Club in San Francisco. Clad in lingerie and speaking in a sultry voice, Carol Doda would ooze around an enormous couch and worry suggestively about what men would do with all of their free time, now that the four-day work week was almost upon us.

Don't remember the four-day work week? At that time, you see, many people actually thought that the benefits of productivity gains enabled by technological advances would be widely shared. In the near future, most of us would work less and earn more.

No, they weren't Commies. Or even hippies. Ordinary people believed that the free-enterprise system was going to bring this about.

Then came the computer revolution of the '80s and the tech bubbles of the '90s and the financial "innovations" of the '00s, and productivity rose, all right. But executive compensation kept soaring higher into the stratosphere while everyone else waited for the benefits to trickle down and....

Well, let's just say that if your earning power has gone nowhere for a decade or two, and your CEO is still urging you to "do more with less" while you "think outside the box," then you know how spectacularly wrong Carol Doda's assumption turned out to be.

To the best of my knowledge, no commentator or politician has ventured far enough outside the box even to raise what you'd think would be the first and most sensible questions about those rioting Frenchmen, to wit:

Wait a minute. Did you just say that they get to retire with full benefits at 60? How did they swing that? How did it work? If it has stopped working, why? Could we devise a system that would let us retire at 60 here -- one that avoided the flaws of the French system? Because in this country, employers want to get rid of us or send our jobs to Asia long before we hit 69, and almost nobody wants to hire us if we're past 50, and it's hard to believe that Walmart is going to need that many greeters.

Challenges? Sure, there would be challenges, what with Social Security and Medicare already creaking, and modern medicine ensuring that everybody grinds on into their 90s.

But why is nobody even thinking about it? It seems that every economist and commentator in the country is just licking his chops at the prospect of watching old people drag their plows through the corporate fields until they drop dead in their traces.

"Pampered French," my derriere. What happened to our four-day work week, and how can we get it back?

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Jack Gordon is a freelance writer who lives in Eden Prairie. He is a source in MPR's Public Insight Network.

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