Call for social system reform
Employer president wants “unleashing”
12/11/2022, 4:37 p.m
“Too sluggish, too inflexible, too expensive” – this is how employer president Dulger sees Germany. He therefore calls for a thorough overhaul of the social system. The retirement age must be linked to increasing life expectancy. However, the trend is going in a different direction.
Employer President Rainer Dulger believes that comprehensive reforms in the field of social security are necessary. “We need the basic renovation of the social system, similar to what Gerhard Schröder courageously tackled 20 years ago,” he told the “Rheinische Post” with a view to the Hartz reforms at the time.
It is already clear “that we will not be able to keep the pension level at 48 percent from 2025,” said the President of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA). The retirement age must be “dynamic and linked to increasing life expectancy”. “We will also not be able to maintain the level of performance in the statutory health and long-term care insurance without reforms,” said Dulger with conviction.
Overall, Germany had become “too sluggish, too inflexible, too expensive,” he said. “We need an unleashing offensive with rules and laws.” The federal government has announced a moratorium on burdens for the economy, “but so far it has not delivered.”
Dulger described it as his association’s responsibility to speak up and warn. “Our job is to keep saying: Attention people, our welfare state will blow us up if we continue like this,” he told the newspaper.
Germans retire earlier
Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants to ensure that fewer people retire before they reach the statutory retirement age. “It is important to increase the proportion of those who can really work until retirement age. That is difficult for many today,” said the SPD politician to the newspapers of the Funke media group and the French newspaper “Ouest-France”.
The Federal Institute for Population Research presented figures on Saturday showing that people in Germany are increasingly retiring early. According to this, many leave the labor market at the age of 63 or 64 – and thus well before the standard retirement age. The institute in Wiesbaden announced that the rapid increase in the employment rate among the over-60s, which was observed at the beginning of the millennium, has largely come to a standstill in the past five years.
One reason for this is the “pension at 63”, i.e. the possibility of early retirement without deductions for people who have 45 years of insurance, which has existed since 2014. In the legislative process at that time, 200,000 to 240,000 of these pension applications per year had been assumed. According to information from the Deutsche Rentenversicherung in November, almost 270,000 new pensioners used the deduction-free route last year. That was 26.3 percent of all new pensions.