Hate It When Stereotypes Become True?

No choice here, I'm afraid: this one goes back hundreds of years and it now seems to be true: the French are terminally lazy en masse. By now, the rest of the Western world has largely absorbed the idea that we all live much longer and can't handle a quarter of the populace no longer chipping that much in to provide for themselves, despite years of punitive health insurance, employers' pension plans et al. that they paid up for in all good faith. Except France. With the lowest retirement age in the EU, you'd have thought they could accept that just maybe all the other 30 or so countries around them had actually seen the bigger picture and perhaps a rethink was called for.
No, what France does is go on strike whenever they're individually hassled. That they do this in a more co-ordinated way than Italy just makes them an even bigger mess in a way; they've combined banging their heads against an inflexible government with blind devotion to their unions and abandonment of basic reason. At least when the Italians strike, they only get to the first step.
The retirement age across the whole EU has to be standardised, at the very least, at 65, male and female. Nothing else is economically viable. I know I want to have the choice, at least, to work until 65, preferably 70.
I do realise that individual unions in France have more than just that figure to contend with: educate me. At the moment, I'm just not convinced.