## 33 Retirees

As a symbol of the French industry, my week was filled with retirements. Thirty percent of my team have retired. Three colleagues in three months is a lot, and among them was a colleague who had worked with me for fifteen years. He was more than just a colleague, of course. He helped me develop this activity, and I taught him many things. He came to France at the age of eight and started working as a bodywork repairer because long-term study was not an option for the children of immigrants in 1970s France. He learned a lot in the automotive industry and became a respected metrologist and a reliable person. He is now proud to have children with master's degrees and five-year higher education diplomas. That's another chapter of his life now.

It's also another chapter in my life, with fewer people at the coffee corner in the mornings. The last time we were all together at a restaurant, there were nine of us from different backgrounds and with different points of view, but we were all in our 50s and 60s. Some of them are not far from retirement. I have more than ten years to go, but I still feel like a young boy — it's just my body that's ageing. However, I'm not very optimistic about the future of the team and our activities. Personally, I'm open to doing something else in the automotive industry. I've had four or five different jobs. However, the big factories are going to close in France. Where I live, there are two big plants belonging to two major French groups, and I predict that one of them will close within ten years, leaving thousands of employees to find new jobs. Many colleagues have left to work in the weapons industry. That's not for me though; I don't want to work for a Merchant of Death.

I don't know if I will maintain contact with those retirees, especially my friend of 15 years. Life is complicated, and he will be living more and more in Turkey, traveling a lot. Some of the retirees come back to say hello in the first year, but rarely two years after that. I sometimes see some of them in 'real life', but most of them are moving to other regions or countries. This is the case for my brother-in-law, and I guess for some of you reading this post too. That's life, and if we're lucky, we can experience three lives in one: school, work and retirement. I haven't seen my school friends for years and I rarely hear from them. I guess I won't see my colleagues again once I retire.

But for the moment, I'm not, and I have a lot to do: a new phase of my job involving lots of administrative tasks; new theoretical knowledge to learn; and new 'customers' in a very complicated context involving EV engines, the return of combustion engines, and uncertainty over the future of some brands. There's less money for buying new machines, but more for shareholders. I should have learnt Chinese! But even for them, it's complicated, with strong internal competition between brands and big cities, because most of the big groups are named after cities (Shanghai Automotive, Chang'an, Dongfeng, etc.).

Retirement is not a common topic in China, but it could become one as the middle class grows and life expectancy increases. My colleagues are quite young, but they started out working on an automotive production line or in a workshop without the safety measures and protections that we have today. Some of my colleagues died before reaching retirement age, or sometimes within the first year after retiring, due to cancers that were certainly caused by the products used in workshops. It is impossible to prove that now. I don't think about it, but I can see that my body is less resilient than it was before my 50^(th) birthday. That's life... But life is not "metro, work, sleep", as they say in France.

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