What the numbers don’t say
1,320 days for dignity: The threshold for access to the old age pension increased from 3,240 to 1,320 days of contributions. A reform which restores rights to those who had worked all their lives without ever reaching the required threshold.
It’s still dark in the neighborhood. A yellow light flashes at the corner of the street, and the silence is broken only by the sharp click of a metal curtain being raised. Boubker is already there. He pushed open the door to the depot as he had for years, and the familiar smell of wood, cement and metal greeted him before the neighborhood even woke up. When the first workers come to pick up their bags of plaster or cement, they will have already put away yesterday’s deliveries, checked stocks, taken out today’s orders. It’s a job he knows by heart.
Boubker is sixty-two years old. A lean figure, large, calloused hands, a smile that unfolds slowly, as if he wants to make sure he’s settling in. He’s one of those workers you don’t see, the ones who keep cities running before their residents wake up. Warehouse worker in a hardware store, then in a materials depot, then in another. Occasional handler. Delivery man when it was necessary to help. He did everything. Everything, except one thing: choosing.
“I haven’t finished my studies. I didn’t have time. My father left early. And when you’re the eldest, you become the man of the family before being a man. » He said this without bitterness. How to state a fact.
Before, there was what he calls “life moving forward.” Get up at 5 a.m., open the depot at 6 a.m., welcome the first master masons who come to get supplies for their site. A boss who declared it, then another who did not. A store that closed, another that opened two streets away.
“Lefiaq bekri b’dheb mechri,” he liked to say to those who were surprised by his schedules. He didn’t like being pitied, in fact, he never complained. He liked to work, with dignity, with his head held high.
He got married. He and his wife had no children. He doesn’t talk about it much. “I would have liked to give them what I didn’t have. School all the way. The right to choose a profession that you love, not just a profession that nourishes you. »
What he didn’t say was that strength wears out. Let the knees finally speak. That carrying bags of cement at sixty is no longer the same gesture as at thirty.
The day he entered the CNSS agency to inquire about his retirement, he thought the hardest part was behind him. He had brought his papers in a plastic folder, neatly arranged. He sat down. He waited. And then the ax fell.
3,240 days. It was the threshold. Ten years of declared contributions. He had less. Much less. Between the bosses who declared it and those who “forgot”, between the depots which went out of business and the periods where he was paid by the week because it was simpler – for them –, his “career” was dispersed in the blind spots of the system. He had worked. He just hadn’t been counted.
“I know how to count, but I don’t know how to do complicated calculations. What I know is that I worked. And there, I was told that all of that was worthless.” He returned home that day. He looked at his wife and said, “We’ll find out.” Without knowing how.
And then, one morning in May 2025, on a neighbor’s phone, he saw a video playing: the contribution threshold had changed. More than 3,240 days. 1,320 days, four years of declared contributions were now enough to qualify for an old age pension. With retroactive effect from January 1, 2023.
Boubker returned to the agency. This time, we told him yes. “The woman at the counter told me, ‘Ssi Boubker, you are entitled to it.’
His pension is not huge. It’s not a fortune, and no one will pretend otherwise. But it’s something. It’s a name on a register. It is the end of an invisibility that has lasted too long. “It’s true that it’s not huge. But I won’t have to reach out. That’s dignity. »
And for those who do not even reach 1,320 days, the reform has provided something else: the possibility of recovering employer contributions in addition to employee contributions. No more question of years of work evaporating in administrative silence.
On May 1, 2025, the threshold for access to the old age pension in Morocco officially increased from 3,240 to 1,320 days of contributions. This measure, resulting from the social dialogue agreement, finally opens access to a retirement pension to hundreds of thousands of Moroccans.
But let’s be honest: it’s just a step. The major systemic pension reform is currently being discussed. The file is complex, sometimes conflicting. Everyone knows it. Nobody claims it’s won. But for the first time, unions, employers and government are talking to each other with workers like Boubker in mind. And that matters too.
This morning, Boubker got up at 5 a.m. Old habit. He made his tea, said his prayers then looked out the window at the still dark street. He won’t go to the depot anymore. And that morning, for the first time in a long time, Boubker did something strange, almost scandalous for a man like him: He fell asleep again.
