June has arrived: it will be the month in which the INPS headquarters, now transformed into the Roman branch of LaVoceInfo, will announce - urbi et orbi, since arrogance has no limits - the welfare reform proposals, conceived - with little attention to the institutional roles and tasks that derive from them – from the volcanic mind of Professor Tito Boeri. Finally, the criteria, methods and purposes of the recalculation, according to the rules of the contributory system, of the notorious ''retributive'' pensions will be clarified.
After the ministers Poletti and Padoan (Schioppan?) have denied that the Government intends to kick the acquired rights, it would seem that this operation - particularly onerous and complex on an administrative level - will be aimed at providing for and applying a fair mechanism to the purpose of defining a solidarity contribution – by its nature corresponding to principles of reasonableness and temporariness – at least on the highest pensions. This gives rise to some reason for amazement given that the treatments (see graph 1 and tab. 2, with the relative comments taken from a study by Stefano and Fabrizio Patriarca) which most benefited from the ''positional income'' of the salary system, are not the highest allowances, but those of an intermediate level and, in particular, acquired through early retirement (i.e. benefits provided to people under the age of 60 and therefore holders of an allowance received for a longer period).
The fact is that under the pretext of restoring flexibility to retirement (this is the theme that is the most popular in the debate on the future of social security, with the complicity of all the parliamentary groups each of which has presented its bill on the subject) we would end up (let's use the conditional as a hope) to reintroduce old age retirement (the bubonic plague of our pension system) "deadly wounded" by the Fornero reform of 2011. To realize this, it is sufficient to consider the bill that it is becoming very popular, also due to the authority of those who presented it (the president of the Labor Commission of the Chamber, Cesare Damiano and the undersecretary Pier Paolo Baretta).
The system of the provision is as follows: taking as a reference point the 66 years of old-age treatment with 35 years of contributions paid or credited, the exercise of the right can take place within a range that goes from 62 to 70 years , with a penalty or incentive of 2% per year depending on whether retirement is brought forward or delayed, for a maximum of 8% in both directions. It suffices to add 62 and 35 to realize that "the murderer has returned to the scene of the crime". In other words, we arrive at that “97 quota” envisaged in the law which implemented the 2007 welfare protocol, when Damiano was the owner of Lavoro. Of course, now there is an 8% penalty which was not contemplated then.
But the advantage of retiring earlier (practically making use of a seniority treatment) is by no means offset by a modest reduction in the allowance. Then where is it written that the Fornero reform provides for too rigid criteria? The art. 24 of the Salva Italia decree has instead introduced a ''reward'' mechanism in favor of those individuals who delay accessing the pension with respect to the minimum age in force and up to the age of 70 (to which is added the link automatic at life expectancy). Indeed, protection against unjustified dismissal is even extended to those who make this choice.
The supporters of flexibility – starting with Minister Poletti and reaching Confindustria via the trade unions – are pursuing only one objective: lowering the minimum entry threshold, restoring some form of early retirement (they have already managed, in the stability law, to eliminate, until the end of 2017, the modest economic penalization envisaged for those who, despite having matured the contribution requirement of 41-42 years, went into retirement before the age of 62).
But how would we deal with the aging bomb, destined to transform the very structure of the population? In Italy, the average life expectancy of a person aged 65 (which in 2015 was 18,6 years for men and 22,2 for women) will rise to 22 and 25,3 respectively by the middle of the century. years. But there will be more over-80s than under-14s, while the ratio of over-65s to the working-age population will double. It will be precisely the needs of the labor market that will require people to work longer; and this will make it possible to make the level of treatments more adequate. It would make no sense to retire people who are still able to work, perhaps with a modest allowance. Why prepare to have poor old people in the short term, when they might not be poor, if they had postponed their retirement when they were old?
These data highlight a situation of great distributive inequity in which the state transfers huge resources to support the most opulent pensions enjoyed in people older than 60 years. It has been observed in some quarters that retirement pensions would have been mainly the "compensation" for blue-collar and early labor. This is not the case: in the approximately one million people who retired between 2008 and 2012, including civil servants and the self-employed, pensions of less than 1500 euros a month, which probably include workers' pensions, are only 18 per cent, and have a total of 10 percent of the pension expenditure.
The astonishment at these figures can still leave room for those who think that it is possible to contribute to relaunching the Italian economy through a policy capable of connecting welfare policies and the labor market, restructuring and not cutting public spending. We can start by attacking the node of the social security system, putting in place an operation of truth on pensions that uncovers the margins for a redistributive intervention within it and that favors employment, protects the weakest, eliminating inequities and privileges: one way effective in substantiating the rhetoric of the "virtuous circle between equity and development".
