Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-04-10-Speech-3-193"
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"en.20020410.6.3-193"2
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"Mr President, it is a pity that our opinion is only being submitted after Barcelona, thus limiting the scope of tomorrow’s vote.
At Barcelona, the Council set itself the objective of increasing the retirement age by five years by 2010, without any conclusion from Parliament or the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs on the subject, and, most importantly, without taking account of the expectations of the citizens and the social partners, for whom this idea is completely unacceptable.
The European Union, which is not competent to decide on matters of social protection but which, in fact, is exercising this competence in the name of establishing the single market in funded pensions, should play a greater part in extending the public debate on the future of pensions.
How should this be done? First of all, by noting, as the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs has done, that this is essentially a social challenge with financial aspects, and not the other way round. Second, this challenge will only be taken up if we accept that the determining factor will be the employment rate rather than population ageing. We already knew that pension funds do not affect the key choices that have to be made by society: what is this question? What is this choice? What proportion of overall wealth do we want to allocate to pensioners?
In the past, we upheld the contributory pension system as a collective system of inter-generational support that creates a social link. Now, we should be completely immune to capitalisation, in view of the Enron affair and the situation of British insurers who are begging their clients to use contributory pension services.
For many companies, employment remains a factor in cost adjustment. The oldest workers, who are also the best paid, often pay the price of company exclusion policies. Under these conditions, we cannot pretend to be astonished that those under threat of unemployment and poverty choose early retirement.
An entirely different goal would be necessary in order to achieve modernisation that takes in to account developments in work and life stages and to create a genuine right to gradual retirement."@en1
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