After months of "oral tradition" - as if the counter-reform of pensions and the institution of the citizen's income and pension were a Homeric poem to be disseminated through the bards - the Government discovered the existence of writing and put into circulation a draft law decree, on which the media rushed with their usual voracity.
To tell how it will be disciplined citizenship income an accurate study would be necessary which we have not yet managed to carry out. The plant is a kind of Disneyland in which more or less all the institutes that have appeared on the labor market in the last decade are represented in caricature, rearranged in a disjointed puzzle that claims to hold together – in a labyrinth – the fight against poverty, good practices of social inclusion and active employment policies. It is for this reason that, for now, we are giving up having our say, focusing instead on pensions and that fateful quota 100 intended - according to the propaganda of the regime - to restore the right to retirement to Italians.
Let's start with a question: What will happen to the ill-treated Fornero reform? For years, Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has "pastorated" his electorate by accusing the notorious article 24 of the Salva Italia decree (converted into law n.214/2011) of social butchery; he didn't hesitate to bring the troops under the former minister's house; he perjured, urbi et orbi, that, with his arrival at the government, those regulations would be repealed, torn up, vilified, within half an hour. Then, along the way, the gallows sentence has been transformed into a vague "overcoming" precisely through the possibility of going into retirement by relying on 62 years of age and 38 years of contributions. It was expected that this would be the addition of a parallel path (overloading of limits and prohibitions), of an experimental nature for a three-year period (quota 100, in fact) intended to coexist with the early retirement requirements introduced in 2011. Otherwise, the two Pillars of Hercules (age and seniority) in competition with each other could have determined for many subjects the repetition of the Fornero effect: that is, by years and suddenly, removing access to retirement and above all making the "quota 100”.
Let's take the example of a worker (the male is not causal because it will be mainly males residing in the North who will take advantage of the new way out), born in 1960, who started working at 16 years old. In 2019 he would have matured, at the age of 59, the requirement of 43 years and 2 months now envisaged. He would therefore be allowed to retire thanks to the rules made by Fornero (which do not require a personal requirement to take advantage of the advance treatment) without having to wait another three years to reach 62. It is equally easy to demonstrate that there would have been, in three-year period 2019-2021, other cases of early workers to be penalized by the introduction of a minimum age requirement (62 years) to take advantage of early retirement.
Initially – before the repeal of the relative regulations – the 2011 discipline also envisaged a limit of 62 years for seniority benefits. But it was not a preclusive constraint on the right to retire; it was limited to a modest economic penalty for anyone who had undertaken the path of early exit having accrued the ordinary contribution requirement before the age of 62. In essence, if the current legislation had been completely replaced, the requirement of 62 years (of 100), could have turned into a sort of ladder for several generations of baby boomers. As can be seen from the table below, the effective age at the commencement of old-age pensions, still in 2018, was on average less than 62 years (which means that many accrue the requirements before the age of 60).
Effective age at commencement of pensions (Fpld) in January-September 2018 (source: Inps)
Our boys: old age 66,5, seniority 61,0.
Our girls: old age 65,9, seniority 60,1.
Total: old age 66,3, seniority 60,7.
Moreover, the number of seniority retirements is constantly growing, so much so that, in the Fpld-Inps, if the flow of old-age benefits in 100 is equal to 2018, the early ones reached 229.
There would, therefore, be the possibility that "quota 100" would create some problems, due to the requirement of 62 years, for "ancien régime" pensioners (with very long contribution histories achieved at a lower age). So, to rest assured, the Government has combined another of its own: blocked the former Fornero rules for early retirement to the values envisaged in 2018 (42 years and 10 months for men and one year less for women) by suspending (also for the so-called precocious) the automatic adjustment to life expectancy trends: a rule that "our ” will remain in force for old-age pensions and therefore above all to be paid by female workers who, due to their position in the labor market often characterized by short and discontinuous careers, are unable to accrue a seniority of contributions which allows them to retire earlier. At this point, the weight of the higher costs is destined to grow. We will see if the technical report will confirm the adequacy of the financial coverage envisaged (and indeed reduced).
