Many keep yelling “Wolf! To the wolf!” (what has this poor animal ever done to deserve such a bad reputation) in the face of the arrival, starting from 2019, the requirement of 67 years to be able to access the old-age pension. And they underline immediately after that, with the automatic coupling to the increase in life expectancy, the requirement is destined to grow further up to around 70 years in the middle of the century. All of this – they conclude – makes Italy the European country to which you retire later, to a limit that will be reached in advance of what happens, in general, elsewhere.
Not by chance, at the end of the previous legislature a robust attempt to block the adjustment mechanism was thwarted, with the aim – he said to himself – of re-discussing it again at a later time to make it less severe. The Gentiloni Government, getting the hint, managed to save the goat of those who asked for its suspension (limiting itself to applying it to 15 categories of disadvantaged work) and the Brussels sprouts and those who watch over in defense of Fornero reform.
What will happen to this standard – of paramount importance to ensure the expected savings – if a majority is formed and a government supported by an alliance between the political forces that swore it to them in the 2011 law? The programs of the two parties (M5S and Lega) which obtained the best electoral result on 4 March are content to indicate solutions (100-year quota or 41-year payments regardless of age) regarding seniority treatment, while there are no references to old age, with related annexes and connections, including the crucial issue of automatic docking.
Wanting to go deeper, we went to see what the last important Report of social security itineraries wrote on the subject, whose boss Alberto Brambilla - the writer has not been denied - was evoked on TV as the inspirer of the ideas of the M5S on the subject of pensions. "They are therefore preferable - says the Report - policies that tend to reward "work", "loyalty to contributions" and long careers for which the indexation of the retirement age to life expectancy remains an indispensable requirement for of the system (especially for short-career and welfare old-age pensions), but oalso needed reintroduce elements of flexibility outgoing restoring the characteristics of the law n.335/1995”.
To this end - this is the heart of the proposal to which is added a structural (and very onerous) restoration of flexible retirement in a range defined – in the first instance, the seniority of contributions should be decoupled from life expectancy (an Italian-only feature introduced with the Fornero reform) providing for a maximum of 41 and a half years of payments with a bonus not exceeding 3 years of notional contributions and a minimum age of 63 years of age. “It is scarcely fair (and, it could be argued, perhaps even unconstitutional) – the Report continues – to imagine that a worker can access a pension with only 20 years of contributions and 67 years of age (perhaps by having the benefit supplemented via of the modest pension calculated) and that another with more than double the contributions and without the risk of integrations to be paid by the tax authorities, must work for over 43 years (in 2019)".
But then, the advocates of retirement – to the point of making it the cornerstone of the pension system – and supporters of the theory that in Italy people retire later than in other countries (in the end they are always the same) are unable to explain a simple fact . If forms of early retirement exist (with different regulations) in almost all other jurisdictions, Italy is the only country where their number exceeds that of old-age benefits, as shown in the following table.
And the story continued the same way. According to data recently released by INPS, this is limited to the private sectors, employees and self-employed, 77% of new retirees are under 65 and 30% do not make it to 60. In 2017, there was an increase in pension spending of 4,7 billion, of which 55% went to early treatments and one billion to people under the age of 60. The stock of old-age pensions is equal to 4,3 million (for a total expenditure of 94 billion, 52% of the total) against 4,7 million old-age (with a cost of 42 billion, equal to 34% of the total which includes obviously also invalidity and survivors). In 2017, for every 100 old-age pensions, 180 old-age pensions were paid overall of the employee fund, 210 in the management of direct farmers, 179 in that of artisans and 110 in traders.
In absolute values, only for the case of private employee work, new early retirement pensions were 88,7 thousand against 49 thousand for old age in 2017 against respectively 78 thousand and 40 thousand in the previous year. As for the gross monthly amount, that of advance payments was on average double that of old age (2,2 thousand euros against just over a thousand). Also in the management of self-employment (artisans, traders and farmers) old-age pensions in 2017 (51 thousand) exceeded those of 2016 (42 thousand) with an average gross monthly amount of 1,5 thousand euros (against 570 euros for old age).
Current pensions (i.e. the stock) in the private sectors at the beginning of 2017 they confirmed a drastic gender difference: 3,3 million men were in early retirement against 940 women; in the case of old age the ratio was reversed with 3,1 million women against 1,7 million men. During the past year, flows confirmed this trend.
Taking as reference the case of the Employees' Fund (FPDL-INPS), the early pensions received by workers were 63 against 25 paid to women. Such an outcome is determined by the conditions of male and female workers in the labor market: the working histories of men belonging to the current generations of retirees (baby boomers) are on average equal to 38 years, while those of women stop at 25,5 .67 years (a seniority slightly higher than that necessary to acquire retirement benefits at an age close to XNUMX).
This gender scenario makes the average age at retirement age even more unbalanced between men and women. In the category of private employees, the former were mostly in a position to make use of the advance payment (in 2017 at 61,2 years on average); the latter mainly had to wait for the requisites of old age to mature, retiring at an average age of 64,8 years.
As can be seen, albeit with a significant gender difference imposed by factual situations, 67 years are still to come.
Read also: Pensions: thirteenths, survivors and self-employed in the IMF viewfinder
