Equal Pension Day in Lower Austria: Significantly fewer pensions for women and much delayed inflation adjustment

2023-07-28 06:21:41

Poverty in old age threatens to increase further

St. Polten (OTS) – On average in Austria, women receive 40.5 percent less pension than men, in Lower Austria it is even more than 41 percent. This is the result of the calculation for this year’s Equal Pension Day, which falls on August 3rd in Lower Austria. While retired men in Lower Austria have EUR 2,251 to live on, women have to make do with EUR 1,326 per month. The reasons for this are lower incomes in female-dominated professions, the high proportion of part-time workers and long career breaks due to child-rearing and care work. Measures are therefore needed quickly to eliminate this inequality,” says AK Lower Austria President and ÖGB Chairman Markus Wieser

Around two thirds of the unpaid family work – childcare, housework and care is still done by women. They only get paid for around a third of their working hours. There is often little time for a full-time paid job. “But the fact is, every month more paid work improves the financial situation in old age. Measures must urgently be taken to enable women to pursue a job that secures their livelihood and to secure them a pension that secures their livelihood,” explains Birgit Schön, head of the women’s policy department at the Lower Austrian Chamber of Labour.

Added to this is high inflation. “Those who have less money available in the stock exchange are much more burdened by the sharply rising prices,” says AK Lower Austria President and ÖGB Chairman Markus Wieser. For those who retire in 2024 and 2025, massive additional pension losses are now threatened due to the greatly delayed inflation adjustment in the pension account. Those who retire in 2024 will only have their pension account adjusted to the extent of the wage development from 2021 to 2022 before they retire. The high inflation of 2022 and 2023 is therefore not reflected in this group of people, but it is in the expenditure. Since women receive a significantly lower pension, they are even more at risk of poverty in old age due to this loss of value.

There is a need for action in many areas. “It needs the long-demanded nationwide expansion of all-day children’s educational institutions for children from the age of one and a model that supports a fairer distribution of gainful employment and family care work. In addition, female-dominated sectors must be upgraded and future pensioners protected from subsequent inflationary losses.” , said AK Lower Austria President and ÖGB Chairman Markus Wieser.

ÖGB Lower Austria women’s chairperson Didem Strebinger points out that long part-time work for women has a particularly negative effect on pensions. Because with the pension account introduced in 2005, it is no longer the best 15 years that count, but the average. “We must give women the opportunity to decide for themselves how long and to what extent they want to work part-time. We can only do that with the right to an educational place for children from the age of one!” says Strebinger. And the care work must be divided fairly between women and men. “It cannot be that it is still the women who naturally take on the care of the children, the household and later the care of the parents and then look through their fingers when they retire!”

ÖGB Lower Austria Pensioners Chairman Johann Palkovic addresses the importance of partial retirement. “The right to partial retirement is an elementary one! In jobs that are physically or mentally very demanding, people in their mid-50s can no longer perform as well as they could in their mid-20s. They need to be able to take partial retirement. The blocked form of partial retirement must also be retained. It is often the only option for people who work shifts.”

Palkovic also calls on companies to fulfill their duty of care for their employees. “It is not acceptable that productivity and the pace of work keep increasing – at the expense of the health of the working people! Health promotion and more consideration for the employees are required here.”

The ÖGB Niederösterreich is on the road with surveys and street campaigns around the Equal Pension Day to create awareness and offer support.