Paris (AFP)

Lift water packs at the checkout, work standing up for a lifetime, breathe in the smell of solvents, carry an elderly person, line cut chickens, clean the sewers ... the arduousness and its thousand faces fuel the worries about pension reform.

According to a note from the Jean Jaurès Foundation published this week, this question of arduousness "structures public opinion in depth" on the pension reform. The strike movement, which has lasted for a month and a half, continues to be popular.

According to an Elabe poll published Wednesday, more than six out of ten French people (61%) consider that Emmanuel Macron "should take into account the disputes and withdraw" the reform, a figure on the rise.

"The greater the arduousness, the more the assets are hostile to a pension reform," write Jérôme Fourquet and Marie Gariazzo of Ifop, in the note from the Jean Jaurès Foundation.

"50% of working people who experience no physical hardship would be ready to contribute (and therefore to work) longer against only 34% of the + rather + exposed and 18% of the + quite exposed +", they add, basing themselves on several Ifop investigations in recent weeks.

The issue of arduousness hangs from end to end over this reform, which will lead the French to work longer.

CFDT number one, Laurent Berger, estimated on December 11 that there were "many shortcomings on the arduousness".

"Working longer does not sound the same for a construction worker who carries heavy loads as for an office worker," he said again this week in the Obs.

Discussions have been held for 15 days at the Ministry of Labor specifically on arduousness and end of career. Nothing has officially filtered even if the idea of ​​a "retraining leave" at mid-career for arduous trades, as a roofer, comes up with insistence.

The CFDT requests the reinstatement of four criteria, withdrawn in 2017, from the arduousness account: handling of heavy loads, painful postures, mechanical vibrations and chemical risks.

- "Hostility and anxiety" -

This account, which is fairly restrictive and little used, allows you to retire earlier or to do training.

The government announced its extension to the public service, but the announcement, made then, of the end of the early departures, except for the trades in uniform, ulcerated several unions of civil servants.

The government has also suggested that it may lower the thresholds for night work.

It is at the branch level that we must define the trades where there is hardship, says Laurent Berger.

For Luc Rouban, researcher at Sciences-Po, "if the question of pensions arouses so much hostility and anxiety, whatever the more egalitarian provisions of the project, it is because work is much less well lived in France than elsewhere, and this at an equal level of qualification, "he recently explained in a column at Le Figaro.

Former researcher at Sciences-Po and former director of the Agency for the Improvement of Working Conditions (Anact), Olivier Mériaux, consultant to the firm "Plein sens", opines. "There is a paradox: the French are among those who are most attached to work and, at the same time, it is those who in Europe show the most dissatisfaction with what they live at work", he explains to AFP.

Because strenuousness is not the only factor at stake and ill-being at work takes many forms.

"Unlike the evolutions in Europe since 2010, in France the room for maneuver in terms of autonomy tends to be reduced, almost for all socio-professional categories", he explains, evoking the singularity of "French model of management and work relations" (importance of hierarchical distance, low participation, low level of fairness, cooperation and trust, etc.).

This explains why "for the most part, and this is even more true for less qualified employees, the retirement horizon is a desirable horizon". A horizon that is somewhat blurred at the moment by the uncertainties linked to a new system.

"A universal pension scheme will force us to rediscuss the way in which we assess the arduousness, on the scale of the work situation or of the trades," he explains. He thus militates for a logic of prevention, rather than compensation, which would come by default when it was not possible to escape the factor of hardship.

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