Pension reform: an online simulator encourages people to arrive late for work to symbolically denounce the text

This satirical campaign comes from a collective mobilizing against raising the legal retirement age to 64. The "Lateness Reform" simulator allows users to calculate how many minutes of delay are needed to compensate for having to work longer hours.

As unions and employers meet again on Wednesday, May 14, to try to amend the pension reform , a collective of artists is mobilizing against the raising of the legal retirement age to 64. The Zélé collective launched a satirical campaign a few weeks ago, "The reform of delays." The principle is simple: encourage the French to systematically arrive late for work to compensate for having to work longer.

Using artificial intelligence, its initiators created a fake ministry, "the Ministry of Latecomers," with a real online simulator. A way to combine humor and protest. How many minutes late should you be to compensate for the decline in age? In the middle of the La Défense business district, where many executives crowd, the question comes as a surprise. Curious, Medhi, 31, tests the simulator. The result quickly comes back. "I have to be 26 minutes late to compensate for the pension reform. It's funny!"

To make this calculation, you need to give your current age, the age you started working, the number of hours worked per week, the number of days worked per year and whether you have had periods of inactivity or unemployment . "We take the imposed working hours, multiply them by 60 and divide by the number of days remaining before retirement," explains the author of the site, Charles-Antoine de Sousa, 36 years old.

A tool that greatly amuses other passersby. "25 minutes late? I'll get started... No, I'm just kidding!" exclaims this engineer. Like her, everyone refuses to apply this incentive to be late, which is too utopian, sighs Nathalie, 42. "It may make you want to, but it's not feasible," she dismisses. "My work will be done in any case, so I'll leave a little later."

This is not a real call for mobilization, assures Charles-Antoine de Sousa. He simply wants to reopen the debate on a reform that he considers unfair. "It was born out of a kind of weariness. We were hardly heard, we were in the streets a lot and it didn't do much good," recalls the thirty-year-old. "The idea is therefore to arrive today with an alternative solution to take back the time that was 'stolen' from us. Obviously, the idea is not for all of France to arrive late, but to become aware of time and to materialize it more clearly ."

"This notion of time is difficult to grasp, but when you break it down into small pieces, it's a way to more clearly visualize the impact it has on our daily lives."

Charles-Antoine de Sousa, author of the simulator

to franceinfo

Today, the site has over 18,000 visitors. But the artistic director admits he has little hope that his communications campaign will persuade the government to back down on raising the retirement age to 64.