Faced with the complaints of workers about what they will receive in retirement – a claim that is part of the protest proclamation of May 1 – Ruiz pointed out that “many times low pensions – I am not generalizing – respond to a work history of precarious employment. For example: if a person worked throughout his life in the domestic sector, and received a low salary, when he retires he will receive the minimum, which in January of this year is 15,750 pesos. The same can happen with other activities where wages are low, in the case of rural workers, they generally reach the minimum retirement age (15,750 pesos)”.
But the disappointment does not end with the previous cases. “There are workers who had a qualified job, with a high average income, and when they compare their monthly income with what they are going to receive in retirement, they find a very important downward difference. The explanation for this is that the way to calculate retirement is based on an average made over the last 10 years or the best 20” and that average arises from the person’s work history.
Ruiz reported how much the worker contributing to the BPS can earn. “For example, if the average of what the worker received shows a salary of 40 thousand pesos, if he has 35 years of work and is 60 years old, he will leave with a replacement rate of 50%”, which would be something like 20 thousand pesos a month for retirement.
On the other hand, “if the person has 30 years of work and is 60 years old, he leaves with a replacement rate of 45%”.
-Retiring to be poor?
-There is a lot of talk about the retirement age and little about the replacement rate, which is what needs to be put on the table to improve it. It is also true that in no country in the world when a person retires is paid the same as when they were active, although at the national level in the military fund they sometimes charge more than when they were active.
Of the approximately 700,000 retirees and pensioners, today we have 146,000 minimum liabilities, and if we add to that that in the last three years they have lost purchasing power, the situation is much more worrying.
He stressed that the worker who receives less has a “subsidized retirement” because if the person had a salary of 10,000 or 25,000 pesos, he will have the subsidy, “reaching the monthly payment of 15,750 pesos, which is the minimum limit of liabilities.”
When the government level has been talking about the BPS deficit for years, “it makes it very difficult for us to promote proposals to prevent pensions from continuing to be so low.”
When asked what the maximum limit of liabilities is, he replied that it is variable, but he took the most common as a basis: “87,506 pesos is the maximum that a person earns, even if he had a monthly salary of 500 thousand pesos in his job.”
Retirements increase in the same percentage as wages, and he gave as an example that when a union fights to improve wages, it is also defending social security, because it is not possible to have high retirements with low wages. Sometimes when there is a union demanding salaries there are people who are against it, for example in recent days there was talk of the shortage of dairy products from Conaprole because the workers were on strike because they wanted to lower their salaries. And if they lower their salary, they lower their pensions because according to the average salary index, pensions evolve.”
