The increase in the retirement age is supposed to be one of the friction areas of the pension reform, which should be addressed at Thursday’s meeting with President Petr Pavel.
In addition to the Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, Marian Jurečka, Karel Havlíček, Alena Schillerová and Aleš Juchelka from the ANO movement, as well as economist David Marek, are invited.
“For me, the fact that the retirement age limit would be breached and that the rate of growth of old-age pensions would slow down from 2026 is not a big deal,” says Aleš Juchelka in advance.
Among other things, he is bothered by the fact that injustices may arise within the framework of the introduced system of gradually increasing the retirement age linked to the hope of living to 50.
How the retirement age will change
A concrete example: The men of the class of 1968 are due to retire at 65 years and five months, and the following class of 1969 will retire at 65 years and seven months.
“Of course I will ask about that,” says Juchelka.
According to ČTK, Minister Marian Jurečka announced his willingness to act before the meeting. “From our side, and I speak for the entire coalition, there is an openness to seek agreement with the opposition on the pension reform so that it is sustainable in the long term,” said Jurečka. He added that, according to him, the ANO movement has not submitted any proposal on how it would like to change the government’s proposal.
“If the proposals of the opposition partners are such that we can move within these barriers, we can talk about changing the parameters,” added Jurečka.
Seznam Zprávám then confirmed that the law does not take into account the fact that the retirement age could even decrease in the future due to life expectancy. It can either stagnate or grow by one to two months between individual years.
“Because no prediction shows that life expectancy should be reduced, and if a situation like the last two years of covid occurred, the increase in the retirement age would stop,” the Minister of Labor explained.
A person is supposed to spend 21 years in retirement
Experts from the Czech Demographic Society also objected in February to tying the retirement age to the current life expectancy of people in their fifties.
“Our main point is that the retirement age should be based on the expected average retirement age, but we have to estimate that age based on the mortality forecast for when those people will be retired, not based on how the actual mortality rate develops when people are 50 years old,” explains demographer Tomáš Fiala, member of the main committee of the Czech Demographic Society. “We have to estimate what it will look like in 15 years for people 65 and older.”
It refers to the idea that people should spend on average the last quarter of their lives in retirement. Marian Jurečka has long been talking about the fact that people should spend an average of 21.5 years in retirement.
At the same time, according to the demographer, the recent covid pandemic serves as an example of a situation where the indicator of life expectancy at age 50 can cause fluctuations in the pace of raising the retirement age and receiving a pension.
“When there was covid, the death rate increased. According to the proposal, this would be responded to by temporarily stopping the increase in the retirement age. The retirement age would not increase for the three cohorts who celebrated their fifties during covid, and it would start to increase again for the next generations after covid subsides. That’s the unevenness,” says Tomáš Fiala.
Every year a month more
According to him, the figure of life expectancy in the covid years represents a hypothetical calculation of what the life expectancy would look like if covid came every year, or more precisely, the death rate was every year like in the covid years.
“It’s an indicator of instantaneous mortality,” says the demographer of the usually published cross-sectional life expectancy.
The Czech Demographic Society therefore proposes a linear increase in the retirement age with revisions based on mortality forecasts. For birth years 1966 to 1977, the retirement age would increase by one month for each birth year.
Demographers discussed their reservations with representatives of the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and offered help if it would be possible to change partial parameters of the pension reform. “That will depend mainly on the minister, we have not heard his opinion yet,” adds Fiala.
