Changing the retirement age in Poland? A new proposition on the table
Experts propose a return to the pension reform from years ago. It assumed an increase and equalization of the retirement age to 67 years of age.
At the beginning of this year, the “Budget SOS” report prepared by the Civic Development Forum (FOR) and the Warsaw Enterprise Institute (WEI) was published. Its aim is to develop cross-party recommendations aimed at stabilizing the situation of public finances.
One of such recommendations is the pension reform, which assumes an increase and equalization of the retirement age for women and men until the age of 67. Let us recall that such a reform was carried out by Donald Tusk’s cabinet in 2012. Five years later, the Law and Justice government reversed it, restoring the old retirement age – 60 for women, 65 for men.
Are we going to see an increase in the retirement age?
The authors of the report believe that in the current conditions they see no possibility of maintaining a low and unequal retirement age. – It harms both men who have to work longer and women who receive lower pensions due to the lower retirement age – emphasizes FOR analyst Mateusz Michnik, quoted by Bankier.pl.
The organization’s calculations show that standardizing the retirement age would bring approximately PLN 50 billion in savings and would be a key element in the stabilization of public finances.
According to the authors of the report, the pension reform should be carried out in 2028-2029, i.e. after the next parliamentary elections. However, it seems that regardless of the results, there will be no such changes. The main political forces, including the Civic Coalition, oppose this. Politicians of this party publicly admitted that the reform from years ago was a mistake that contributed to the decline in the party’s popularity and, consequently, the loss of power in 2015.
Interestingly, as shown by a survey conducted by SW Research for “Wprost”, nearly half of Poles (47%) are in favor of equalizing the retirement age for women and men. However, quite a large group (42.5%) opposes this solution. Every tenth survey participant has no opinion on this matter.
Other recommendations in the report also include the liquidation of the 13th and 14th pensions. A recent survey for our editorial office shows that in this case the group of opponents clearly outweighs the supporters of this option (65.3% and 18.7%, respectively).
