In an interview with Radio Panama, Eduardo Gil of the National Council of Organized Workers (CONATO) indicated that this organization does not disagree with the elimination of the solidarity system for individual savings as one of the measures to save the pension program of the Caja de Seguro Social, since most of the countries that have implemented this individual system have had to go back and return to the solidarity account system because it has not been sustainable over time.
“It is not just about saving the CSS but also guaranteeing that each one of the active workers at this moment a retirement so that they can have a decent life, it is useless to save the Social Security Fund and that later the workers retire with 150-200 dollars, that would be absurd, you have to have a balance to save the fund and that there are decent pensions “Gil indicated
According to a report by the International Labor Organization (ILO), the pension subsystem of the Social Security Fund will have a total reserve depletion in 2024 and presented several recommendations for its reform.
For Gil, there are several alternatives that can be discussed to save the CSS: “CONATO has proposed 35 measures without affecting workers, among them are the assets that the Panama Canal, mining, ports, for example, can provide, and make higher profitability of the CSS funds and at the moment they are not generating interest, so the pension funds are not growing”
“It is focusing only on increasing the retirement age and on the increase in quotas that are not going to solve the problem, but rather would be a Band-Aid in a complex system or that is resolved by individual accounts, this would work if people were permanently in a job, but there is a lot of job instability, this means that individual workers contribute less to the system and therefore their pensions are uncertain”, Gil concluded.
