tions - which shamelessly seek to divide and rule, playing one workforce off against another.
The other argument revolves around the declining birth rate and rising age profile of many European coun tries, which leaves fewer people of working age paying into a system funding pensions on a "pay as you go" basis from contributions.
Demographers project sharply falling populations in countries including Italy, Poland and Hungary. Germany is expected to have seven million fewer people of working age by 2030, but 8.5 The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is a club for the world's 30 richest nations: it does not so much make policy as coordinate the responses on issues such as pensions.
One DECD document explains the current thinking:
"The public pension accounts in most member countries will start to go into sustained deficit in about ten years time. Public provision of health and long term care for retirees will add to the burden.
"Countries could finance future social spending obligations by raising payroll taxes to whatever level was necessary, but these would be so high as to discourage work effort and would cut deeply into working people's living standards.
These considerations point to the overriding importance of curbing the growth of spending on public pensions, health and
long term care". It is worth noting the deliberate counterposition in this DECD analysis between
This those receiving pensions, approach health care and longterm care on the one
nas no room for hand (the previous generation of workers, whose solidarity.
needs are now described as a "burden"), and "working people's living standards" on the other. This approach has no room for inter-generational solidarity. In place of the notion that the reward for increased productivity, an expanding economy and a lifetime of hard work would be a future of increased leisure and earlier retirement the OECD now argues that - to keep the system solvent -working lives should be prolonged, at least to 70 years of age.
"There is no economic or biological basis for retirement when people are in their 50s or 60s, yet the length of leisure in retirement is increasing rap(Stephen Hawki.
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