A study of the DGB shows a large gap in Pensions in Bavaria. However, the Interpretation of the data is controversial.
By Dietrich Mediator
Low statutory pensions, do not mean, in any case, poverty. If claims from other supply stations, has earned the life partner better, or even family assets is available, then you can keep in old age, people with a small pension, their standard of living. The new, of the Hans-Böckler-Foundation funded publication, which dealt intensively with the question of why a lot of people have, in spite of many years of insurance periods, only small pension rights.
Matthias Jena, Chairman of the DGB Bavaria, made it clear on Friday at the presentation of the pension reports Bayern in 2018, that low pensions lead automatically to old-age poverty. “Some of them have something to ensure inherited private or have a company pension,” he said. In addition, many would in Bavaria, in the meantime, a higher state pension. “But many of the values even lower than this already very poor average.” For Matthias Jena, and his Deputy, Verena Di Pasquale, the message of the new report is therefore: “poverty in old age is already a reality.”
pension scheme
What needs to change in pension
While it is commendable that the policy had improved in the sense of the pensioners. According to the Report, the pension adjustment in 2016 for West Germany at 4.25 percent was alone, which in the free state the average pension amount increased for already-retired located in men by 63 Euro – Bavaria’s stock of pensioners got 44 euros more. Summa summarum was, therefore, the average statutory old-age pension for existing pensioners in 2017 in Bavaria in 1141 Euro and for existing pensioners 654 Euro.
it is Clear that such sums unionists put like Matthias Jena hardly in euphoria, because the recipients of those pensions, the Jena calls “good pensions”, does not make up the majority of the population. “Good pensions of more than 1500 euros, attained a little more than 25 percent of the men but only slightly more than four percent of the women,” he said. Clearly, then, the DGB uses to powerful formulations, the statisticians and the forehead can wrinkle. Such a formulation sounds approximately so: “More than 70 percent of women and 37 percent of the men who went to 2017, in Bavaria, in retirement, with a Belugabahis pension of less than 900 euros, well below the risk-of-poverty threshold from the current level of 1074 euros.”
“As so often in the debate about pensions and poverty in old age that is a distortion of representation”, writes Sebastian E. Wenz, a researcher at the Gesis-Leibniz Institute for the social Sciences in Cologne, Germany. Low pensions were set automatically with poverty. “In the case of the above-mentioned 70 percent of women whose partners raises by a higher pension in the same household above the poverty threshold,” he said.
Apart from these skirmishes, the Figures of the DGB-pension reports are troubling – keywords sunken level of pensions, precarious or atypical employment contracts. So, for example, does not deny that in Bavaria, in 2017, retired men receive an average of around 60 euros less than those who stood before them to their rest started. Here at least the women are recently in the front. Due to higher labour-force participation “with changes in the acquisition curves” to get the new pensioners of the interior of 2017 and an average of 30 Euro more than the stock of pensioners.
“On questionable, low-level”
but prepares Jena and his Deputy, Di Pasquale: the disability pensions for people who, due to illness of retiring from working life to retirement, are “still a concern low level”. On average men in 2017 for the first time, disability pension based on payment amounts in the amount of 793 euros, in the case of women, it was 704 Euro. “A lot of acquisition-reduced”, it is said in the Report, “are forced to whether the low number of amounts of to apply for in addition to basic security.” And: “Nearly 40 percent of the acquisition for impairment losses are psychological. In 2002 there were still almost 30 percent.” For Jena, a sign that “the psychological stress in the work are on the increase” and that, in the world of work, something urgently needs to change.
in the face of in Bavaria, diverse economic structures, it is, however, hardly surprising that the respective pensions, there are large differences: in Bavaria, the city of Augsburg with statutory average pensions for men of only 662 Euro, while new pensioners in the circle of Erlangen-Höchstadt with 1368 Euro in the year 2017, have received the highest legal average pension in Bavaria. Augsburg social speaker Stefan Kiefer has a clear answer: “Augsburg production site, where the people were traditionally poorly paid – such as in the textile industry.”