There's a judge called time that puts everyone in their rightful place. Or as Francesco De Gregori sings: ''History proves you wrong and gives you right''. In recent days, Mattia Feltri, in his column in La Stampa (''Buongiorno'') has put his hands in the slime of insults that an "accidental statesman" like Matteo Salvini has addressed – for the last 12 years – to Elsa Fornero is preferably used for pension reform which bears his name when he was Minister of Labour in the Monti government.
The poison of the Lega Nord propaganda
Feltri has made a careful collection of theLega propaganda garbage dump, highlighting their hatred, rudeness and above all dishonesty. The Fornero reform was contained in a couple of articles of the Salva Italia decree, presented by the Monti government as a whole and converted into law with a Bulgarian vote in Parliament. Attributing its consequences to a single person as if Fornero had been a sort of Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero Molina, the soldier who entered the Cortes in Madrid, threatening the deputies with a gun. The League He also organized demonstrations under his birthplace of Fornero in a small village in Piedmont. But the the real scandal was another: the Captain's low-grade propaganda made inroads into public opinion. It was accepted uncritically that the reform had kidnapped Italians, preventing them from retiring before reaching the age attributed to Methuselah.
The media, in general, thought this was the right approach to making news and went along with it.
The question of the early retirees
The first soap opera was the one on CDs exodus, specifically, people who had accepted extra severance pay to leave their jobs, either as a result of a union agreement or through private negotiation. In these cases, the interested parties complained of a misalignment between the retirement age limit (or seniority required for the advance) expected at the time of the actual exodus and theincrease of these requirements within the reform. He came to create an ''uncovered'' period where the subject did not receive a pension or a salary. The problem was real and the government took care of it already in the conversion of the decree "thousand prorogations" with the before the nine amnesties. But identifying those entitled was complex. Where the incentivized exodus had occurred through a union agreement following restructuring processes, the interested parties were reached in a transparent and correct manner; in cases of agreement between the parties it was more difficult. Then there were subjects who had lost their jobs without incentive benefits and they had seen the retirement limit move away.
For months, television talk shows hosted legions of people who lamented their miserable fate, as if they had been deprived of acquired rights (such as retiring at the previous retirement age). None of them - if I remember correctly - was asked how much the extra severance pay amounted to. That is, whether it corresponded only to the amount of the voluntary contribution or allowed for a certain amount of disposable income. In any case, the forecast error was recognized. The fact is that the people who were in other conditions were also considered "exoduses".
Sanatoriums and safeguards
Then a singular chase which led, in addition to the first, to seven others amnesties (later became nine), by establishing a specific fund which was to have poured any savings from any safeguard measures into the fund itself, in addition to additional funding to recognize the exemption for other situations. As warned in a Focus of the Parliamentary Budget Office (UPB) of 2016, drafted therefore after the 7th safeguard: ''If the sequence of safeguard interventions were to continue, the progressive change in the objective of these measures would emerge with ever greater clarity: not an exemption specifically addressed to workers who find themselves in economic difficulty in the years between the cessation of their activity and the receipt of their first pension due to the changes introduced by the Fornero reform (i.e. the early retirees in the strict sense), but a solution to protect larger groups and not necessarily, or not all, directly damaged by the reform, using safeguards as a surrogate for passive labor policies or other welfare institutions that are currently undersized or absent''.
Thus, a factual situation, blown out of proportion by the television media, has contributed to creating a critical climate compared to the 2011 reform, also reducing the amount of savings.
Savings eroded by propaganda
Again the UPB in the Focus cited pointed out that the INPS had estimated that the savings achievable thanks to the Fornero reform would be almost 88 billion over the decade 2012-2021. Of these savings, the seven safeguards up to that point, in their latest spending programming, eroded approximately 13 percent, a useful figure for verifying to what extent the same safeguards are interacting with the original objective of the Fornero reform to slow down the spending dynamics. More up-to-date accounts - up to the eighth intervention, indicate that 200 thousand subjects were safeguarded and around 12 billion in lower savings. Many "exoduses" who had not managed to enter the safeguards could have taken advantage of theSocial bee, then also of quota 100. But being able to fall within the pre-reform rules was certainly more advantageous, both with regard to the old-age retirement age and the requirements for seniority benefits.
Women, the most penalized
No one has ever told the truth about the Fornero Reform. Those who paid a high price were the workers, as a result of a process already started before the 2011 reform: the equalisation of the retirement age of women to that of men. On the basis of the previous legislation, the process of homogenization (there were 5 years of difference from 60 to 65; in addition, since the automatic adjustment to the increase in life expectancy was underway, the objective to be achieved was moved forward). Unification had already been achieved at forced marches in the public sector. In the private sectors it should have been completed in 2024; the Fornero reform brought forward its conclusion to 2018. Thus, while for men the effective age at the start of the pension has increased by a few, for women it has grown by at least 3 years.
The fact is explained in actual practice, because in the case of female workers, in general, there is no escape: are by far the largest users of old age pension because – unlike men – I am not able to accumulate the required seniority in private for early retirement and therefore end up on the path to old age where, as far as contributions paid are concerned, 20 years are enough, at 67 years of age. A On average, a woman works in Italy for 28 years against about 37 for a man. Yet, if we follow the debate of recent years, the complaints and interventions carried out have always protected, to the extent possible, early retirement/seniority, or, in the private sectors, the actual treatment reserved for males, residents in the North, or the strong component of the labor market (in the public sector the situation is different), where she entered early and remained for a long time on a stable and continuous basis and was able to reach the retirement threshold regardless of the age requirement of just over sixty (in 2024, 61,7 years).
The cost of tampering
Just think that all tampering and alternatives made in the 12 years in which the Fornero reform has been in force, the legislator has only concerned himself with the early retirement (and therefore who could benefit from it). We have already spoken about the early retirees. We started almost immediately with the abolition of the symbolic economic disincentive for those who went early before the age of 62. Then, the social Ape, the early/forty-first workers, the workers in difficult conditions, quota 100, the blocking of early retirement at 42 years and 10 months for men and one year less for women, have always pounded the mortar of early retirement.
For the workers, as long as it lasted, it remained Woman option, which has always been a niche solution and penalised on an economic level (the only one, so far, in the pension horizon). 41 quota would be the product of the same male chauvinist logic, tailored to the profile of baby boomers but applied to generations that have nothing to do with the characteristics of the previous ones. All this work has allowed 900 thousand workers to escape the new rules and has 48 billion of the 88 that would have been saved under the regime have been blown away. From January 1st of next year, the path of the 2011 reform will be seen to restart, a bit bruised and limping. Salvini has suffered the fate of the "mountain pipers".
