Verdi chief Frank Werneke has demanded that Federal Labour Minister Alexander Schweitzer (SPD) present a bill preserving the penalty-free pension for people with particularly long insurance records of 45 contribution years. In an interview with the Funke media group, reported on Monday among others by the television channel n-tv and ZDFheute, Werneke called for a draft “that refrains from raising the retirement age” and “preserves the pension for people with particularly long insurance records of 45 contribution years”. In addition, the pension level of 48 per cent must be stabilised and expanded beyond 2031.
No draft bill from the Labour Ministry has been presented so far. Since the summer, the government and the coalition have been deliberating the proposals of the pension commission appointed by the federal government, which presented 33 recommendations at the end of June, including the abolition of the so-called pension at 63. The leaders of the Union and SPD subsequently announced that they wanted to implement all the proposals as a package. Responsibility for the draft bill lies with Schweitzer, who took over the office from Bärbel Bas in mid-October.
Ten billion euros – and what they mean
Werneke defended the penalty-free early pension against the savings argument. The roughly ten billion euros that an abolition is supposed to save corresponded to “about 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points in the pension insurance contribution”, he said according to ZDFheute and n-tv. “Presenting that financially is possible.” By his own account, however, he is not thereby calling for a contribution increase of 0.1 percentage points: “The current contribution forecasts assume that the pension after 45 contribution years is retained.”
The Verdi chief also rejected the argument that the rule mainly benefits well-paid employees in office jobs and not the people for whom it was intended. “The argument assumes that only a certain group was intended for the penalty-free pension after 45 contribution years. That is not true,” he said. “It was introduced from the perspective of honouring the lifetime achievement especially of those who worked for a long time or had periods of childcare.” He put the number of those affected at “over 250,000 people per cohort”.
Dispute over care and childcare periods
According to ZDFheute, citing the ‘Bild’, a compromise proposal is being discussed within the Union: the early pension would be retained, but care and childcare periods would no longer be fully counted towards contribution years. ZDF capital correspondent Nicole Diekmann reports on this. Werneke thinks nothing of it. In the ‘Morgenpost’ he called such a proposal “quite clearly a misogynistic proposal”, because care and nursing work is predominantly done by women. “And that above all deprives women of the prospect of retiring early without deductions.”
At the same time, Werneke made clear in the interview that the early pension has long ceased to be a “pension at 63”: at present it can only be claimed at the age of 64 years and six months, and the entry age continues to rise to 65. It is “entirely appropriate” that people with such a long insurance record can retire two years earlier without deductions.
The federal government’s timetable is tight. According to Bayerischer Rundfunk, Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) made clear in mid-October that the draft bill should be adopted by the cabinet this year and by the Bundestag in the first quarter of 2027. Schweitzer himself had made the submission of a draft conditional on a prior agreement within the coalition. Werneke is counting on “the coalition reaching agreement while retaining the penalty-free pension after 45 insurance years” – and at the same time warns that the 33 recommendations must not be treated as an unalterable “Gesamtkunstwerk”.
Editor’s note: Whether and in what form the coalition will actually retain the early pension is open. Werneke’s demands are positions of the trade union, not decisions of the government.
