Quote:
Originally Posted by Bakkels
Eehm, not to be a pain, but first of all, you have different pensions ages for women and men in the UK? I find that kind of weird in the first place.
And it's 60 for women? Well I'm sorry but raising that age only seems a good thing to me.
|
I agree with you regarding this point, as long as child education times are also considered towards your pension- which they are here, iirc 3 years per kid.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bakkels
Over here the pension age just got raised a year ago. Yes there were some protests, but the bill made it through parliament. And I got to say, it's only natural. In the 50's, a very famous social-democrat prime-minister here introduced pensions, a standard pension for elderly people and general health care. Socialist as he was, even he said (back in the fifties, that is) that the pension age should rise to compensate for the increased life-expectancy.
|
The guy said it in the 50s, where we had full-employment. These times will never come back. I live near the Ruhrgebiet, which used to be the industrial heartland of Germany. Only a fraction of the jobs were shifted from the industrial to the service sector. Most jobs just vanished.
I might be subjective, as most old people I know/knew come from a working-class/lower middle class background. You cannot do manual labour indefinitely - and certainly not everybody can switch to an administrational job at old age, not only because of the skills but also because of an limited amount of these positions.
This is something which is not considered in a static age limit: the different worn-out levels of the people. There are certainly many people who are eager and fit enough to work till they reach a high age, nobody should stop them doing so, but not everybody has the skills, health and possibility to do so.
Another problem I have with the argument of the increased lifespan of the people. It is certainly true that we live longer. But should the consequence be that we all work till near death? Maybe we just should say good-bye to this 19th/early 20th century model of labour and enjoy the fruits that an increased productivity can purvey to us. Or do we need to re-indroduce barren, repetitive manual labour at a conveyor belt, just for the sake of creating jobs?