The International Day of Older Persons, celebrated annually on October 1, was established by a special resolution at the 45th session of the UN General Assembly in 1990. Unfortunately, life has not gotten any better for the vast majority of older people.
A clear example of a well-coordinated global attack on the rights of older people is the waves of “pension reforms” that have swept across the world. People did not order their national authorities to implement such reforms, and thus these actions were contrary to Article 21(3) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.”
The response to this offensive has been the work led by our International Union of Retired and Senior Citizens, part of the World Federation of Trade Unions. October 1 is not only a holiday for us, but first and foremost the World Day of Struggle for the Rights of Pensioners and Senior Citizens. And this struggle, of course, is not just one day a year.
The dismantling of social gains is especially clear after the counter-revolutionary coups in our countries in the late 80s and early 90s. It all followed roughly the same scenario, which is why our current problems are very similar.
Compared to the times of socialism in most of our countries, the real average pension has significantly decreased and is usually at or even below the subsistence level. Thus, many of our pensioners live in real poverty.
In addition, as a result of pension “reforms” the age of retirement has risen sharply. During socialism it was 55 for women and 60 for men in most countries. Now, it has become higher by 5-7 years or more. This is officially justified by the allegedly increased life expectancy, which, given the “optimization” of the health care system, i.e. the reduction in the number of state medical institutions and medical workers, is absolutely untrue.
The above-mentioned “optimization of health care” and the course for its commercialization significantly worsens the living conditions of our pensioners and reduces its duration, despite all the manipulations with statistics.
In most of our countries, the socio-economic situation has also deteriorated significantly with the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine are the most affected, however, the “war of sanctions”, in particular the “gas war”, and the militarization of the economy have also had serious consequences, negatively affecting not only the participants in the conflict, but also almost the whole of Eurasia. Pensioners and the elderly, as the most socially unprotected part of the population, suffer first of all.
Despite the considerable diversity of socio-economic and political conditions in our almost 30 countries, the following directions of the pensioners’ struggle stand out:
- Abolishing the increase in the retirement age and returning it to the parameters that existed under socialism.
- Raising the minimum pension to 1.5 times the pensioner’s subsistence minimum.
- Raising the average pension to no less than 50% of the average wage.
- Indexation of pensions for all pensioners, including working pensioners, in accordance with real inflation rates.
- Payment of subsidies to pensioners for payment of housing and communal services in the amount of not less than 50% of their amount.
- Real, not only declared, provision of free medical care to all pensioners.
And this work is already bringing certain results. In particular, after mass protests, the Polish authorities were forced to partially cancel the increase in the retirement age. In Russia, we have achieved significant success in protecting the rights of working pensioners, in which we have also been actively involved. The Russian parliament recently passed a law on indexation of pensions for working pensioners, who are now equalized with non-working pensioners in this respect. There are 8 million working pensioners in Russia, and they have not had their pensions indexed for almost 10 years, during which time they have depreciated by at least two thirds due to inflation. We should note similar successes achieved by our Kazakhstani comrades.
We call on all trade unions in our countries to cooperate in protecting the interests of pensioners and the elderly.
By joint collective actions we will restore the legal rights of our compatriots to pensions and well-deserved rest!
Sergey Skvortsov,
Coordinator for Former Socialist Countries
International Trade Union of Pensioners and Senior Citizens of the World Federation of Trade Unions
