Extraordinary meeting of the House of Representatives on the proposal to limit the extraordinary June valorization of pensions, February 28, 2023, Prague. In the photo, Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Marian Jurečka.
Prague – Minister of Labor Marian Jurečka (KDU-ČSL) will meet in the next two weeks with representatives of the opposition movements ANO and SPD, trade unions and employers regarding the new setting of pension valuations and the adjustment of early retirement rules. He told journalists after today's initial meeting on pension changes with representatives of the ANO movement. He plans to present the outlines of the pension reform only after discussion, probably at the turn of March and April.
Advertisement'; }
“Negotiations will follow in the next few days. I expect that there will be several rounds of negotiations… We will meet in 14 days for the next round of negotiations. We will also conduct negotiations on adjusting the valuation for the future and, possibly, on adjusting the parameters of early retirement. It is necessary to seek maximum agreement so that the changes are permanent,” said Jurečka.
ANO MPs requested documents and data from Jurečka. “Our expert will be included in the work team that works on the pension reform,” stated the president of the ANO club, Alena Schillerová. Jureček's pension commission includes representatives of coalition parties, the ministries of labor and finance, and several experts. Trade unionists also want to get into it.
According to Schillerová, Jurečka should have come up with some proposals for changes to valuations or early pensions a long time ago. “It is not possible for early retirement to be more advantageous than regular retirement. We will support the minister in this. Then there are some items that do not need to be included in the valuation, for example we talked about educational ones,” specified the head of the club.
< p>Pension valuations should be adjusted from next year according to the plan. Both regular January pension increases and extraordinary increases due to inflation should slow down. Now, pensions always increase from January by the increase in prices and half of the increase in real wages, now it could be, as in the past, by a third of the increase in real wages.
In particular, pensions are now rising after the increase in price increases exceeds five percent over a certain period. Czech Television reported that the Ministry of Labor is proposing several options. According to the first version, in case of high inflation, pensioners would receive a lump-sum sum, according to the second, the increase in prices would be compensated during the regular January valuation, and according to the third, half of the increase in prices for the monitored period would be added.
After high extraordinary valuations, pensions in the early term higher than in the regular term. They can differ by hundreds of crowns or several thousand crowns. Between last autumn and the end of the year, 120,000 people showed interest in early retirement, and a third of them also started receiving it. Another third have so far postponed their payment, and with a third the social administration will process applications additionally this year, last year it did not have time to process them due to the rush.
Experts criticized the setting of early pensions last year. They recommended a change. The National Economic Council of the Government (NERV) also called for a reduction in the number of early retirements in its recommendations to reduce debts.
