Stop raising the retirement age and new solutions to ensure early retirement for women employed in unpaid "care work". These are the two fronts on which Parliament is moving in view of a further revision of the Fornero law.
RETIREMENT AGE AND LIFE EXPECTANCY: HOW THE ADJUSTMENT WORKS
The most sensational news concerns the bipartisan agreement to modify the mechanism that today automatically raises the retirement age to bring it into line with Istat forecasts on life expectancy. You live longer – is the reasoning – so you retire later.
So far, this type of increase has occurred twice: in 2011 (+3 months in the three-year period 2013-2015) and last year (+4 months in 2016-2018). With the rules in force (which provide for a three-year review until 2021 and a two-year review from that year onwards) the retirement age, currently 66 years and 7 months, should rise according to this scheme
– 67 years old in 2019;
– 67 years and 3 months in 2021;
– 68 years and 1 month in 2031;
– 68 years and 11 months in 2041;
– 69 years and 9 months in 2051.
THE COMPARISON WITH OTHER COUNTRIES
With these increases, Italy would become an isolated case in Europe. The comparison with the retirement age of other countries, in fact, is merciless:
– in Austria 65 years for men and 60 for women;
– in Belgium and Denmark 65 years for everyone;
– in the UK 65 years old;
– in Germany 67 years only from 2029.
THE DAMIANO-SACCONI PROPOSAL
Also for this reason, with the next Budget law, the Government intends to block the automatic increases, or at least revise the rules. The proposal came - at the request of the unions - from Cesare Damiano (Pd) and Maurizio Sacconi (Epi), two former ministers of Labor and currently presidents of the Labor commissions of the Chamber and Senate respectively. The idea is to lengthen the time between one adjustment and another, bringing it to five years for example. In any case, the priority is to postpone the planned release for 2019: it would mean retiring 300 more people a year and would cost between 1,2 and 1,5 billion a year.
At the political level, the agreement is surprising above all because in the past Sacconi has implemented (or supported) several increases in the retirement age in the Berlusconi governments and then also this same adjustment mechanism in 2009.
Apparently, now he has changed his mind: "We need to return to a logic of humanity - he says - too much technocratic logic has taken us further, producing a real emergency condition".
According to Damiano, we need to "promptly address this very hot topic in unitary terms, which concerns the lives of citizens", also because "it is extremely contradictory" to first wage a battle for output flexibility with the introduction of the Ape and then automatically raise the retirement age.
NEWS FOR WOMEN'S RETIREMENT
Speaking of the Ape, the idea of introducing a preferential lane for access to the social version of the pension advance. The beneficiaries would be women who have carried out unpaid "care work" to meet family needs.
Alternatively, this same category could access early retirement by taking advantage of notional contributions, i.e. insurance periods credited free of charge by the State in the absence of contribution payments by some workers to be protected.
A third option envisages the strengthening of a rule already envisaged by the Dini reform, which introduced the contribution system but also granted working mothers a 4-month discount on the retirement age for each child, up to a maximum advance of one year.
