Why Olaf Scholz wants to break the “early retirement trend”.
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD)
Source: pa/dpa/Carsten Koall
Because more and more employees are leaving the labor market earlier than planned, the federal government is alarmed. So far, however, a higher retirement age has not played a major role in the current debate: Instead, the focus is on employers.
DThis development worries the chancellor: precisely in the large baby boomer cohorts, the trend of retiring earlier than stipulated by law is increasing. A development that, according to a study by the Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB) published at the weekend, is having a “strong impact on the economic labor supply” and “increasing the lack of experienced, qualified workers”.
According to the institute, the microcensus data evaluated by the BiB show that the previous steady increase in the number of older employees in the labor market has largely come to a standstill over the past five years. According to this, many employees are currently leaving the labor market at the age of 63 or 64, well before the standard retirement age. It is 65 years and nine months for workers born in 1955; From those born in 1964, according to the current legal regulation, the retirement age should be permanently 67 years. But many members of the baby boomer generation – 1955 to 1970 – do not want to work that long.
According to the BiB, in 2021 every third person would access the pension system via the option introduced in 2014 to draw a pension early without deductions for those who have been insured for particularly long years, the so-called “pension at 63”. In addition, current figures from German pension insurance show that employees are increasingly willing to accept deductions from their pension in order to retire before they reach retirement age. According to the BiB, this group makes up around a quarter of all those who will draw an old-age pension for the first time in 2021.
Numbers that Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD) took as an opportunity to point out the problems associated with early retirement. The goal must be “to increase the proportion of those who can really work until retirement age,” said Scholz of the French newspaper “Ouest-France” and the Funke media group. “That’s difficult for many people today.”
People retire early more often – Scholz wants to take countermeasures
More and more people in Germany are retiring early. This poses additional problems for the economy, which is already suffering from a labor shortage. Chancellor Scholz wants to counteract this.
However, there was approval from different camps. Both Employer President Rainer Dulger and the Social Association Germany welcomed Scholz’s initiative. Dulger demanded that the retirement age must be “dynamized” and linked to increasing life expectancy. The chairwoman of the board of directors of the German social association, Michaela Engelmeier, suggested that retraining and better working conditions should be used, for example, to ensure that employees could actually work up to the standard retirement age.
“Improve work culture in companies”
Among the parties represented in the Bundestag, the SPD, FDP and AfD basically agreed with the chancellor, but gave their statements different accents. SPD parliamentary group leader Dagmar Schmidt emphasized that her parliamentary group “did not deny anyone their well-deserved retirement” and “neither want to lead a renewed discussion about raising the retirement age nor increase the pressure with higher deductions”. In order for more people to “actually be able to make it to the age limit at all”, topics such as preventive health care and rehabilitation would have to “become much more important in the world of work”.
For the socio-political spokesman of the FDP parliamentary group, Pascal Kober, the social partners are particularly in demand. Employers and trade unions must make offers to employees “on how working life can be made more and more attractive in the last few years before retirement, financially, but also by reducing the workload and flexible part-time models”. The pension policy spokeswoman for the AfD parliamentary group, Ulrike Schielke-Ziesing, welcomed the Chancellor’s initiative, but complained that this would be thwarted by the decision by the traffic light parliamentary groups to abolish the additional earnings limits for early retirees from January 2023.
The social policy spokesman for the Greens, Frank Bsirske, on the other hand, emphasized that the lifting of the additional earnings limits decided by the traffic light coalition “improves the incentives to continue working while receiving a pension”. It is also important “that the quality of work and work culture in companies, businesses and administrations are improved so that employees can do their work healthy, qualified and motivated for as long as possible”. The Union faction left the WELT request unanswered.
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