The issue arose last June 21, when Donato Marti, a retired worker originally from Avetrana (Taranto), died while working on the renovation of a building in the city center. He fell from a five meter high scaffolding. His death grieved the community not only because his death was yet another death at work, but because he was a retiree. Marti “should have enjoyed retirement, playing with his grandchildren and taking some walks with his wife,” said the former deputy mayor of Avetrana, Alessandro Scarciglia. “To survive, however, despite his age, he was forced to work again”.
The unions also used very harsh tones. “The deaths at work are all unacceptable, that of a 72-year-old construction worker who falls from a height of 4-5 meters is even more anger,” said the general secretary of the UIL of Lecce. The general secretary of the CGIL of Lecce, in turn, strongly denounced the problem: “A question of real survival arises for those who arrive at retirement after forty years of hard work and suddenly find themselves dealing with with the state of need. Many retirees are almost forced to resort to extra, often makeshift, jobs. A provision is urgently needed to increase the purchasing power of pensions, for example by enlarging the number of recipients of the so-called fourteenth “.
The international press has called it a “great de-retirement”: the phenomenon that is forcing the elderly who were retired to return to work due to the general rise in prices and the increase in inflation. According to the Washington Post, about 1.5 million retirees in the United States have returned to work in the last year, a figure in contrast to what happened in the last two years, when 2.4 million people left the job market by choosing early retirement.
In the United Kingdom, data from the Office for national statistics (Ons) show that around 100,000 people over 65 have returned to work or are looking for work since the most critical phase of the health emergency ended. The causes are manifold. Some think that the increase is due to the loneliness generated by the pandemic, which would push people to turn to work to find some sociality. More realistically, the reason that led many seniors to return to work was the increased cost of living. Inflation has eaten up 20 percent of retirement, many say, and retirement plans that seemed sustainable a year ago are no longer sustainable.
The great de-retirement is a very current phenomenon and destined to cause discussion, also because often the health conditions of people who “come out” of retirement would not allow them to return to work.
In Italy the situation is less clear. The Istat report The living conditions of pensioners, published in 2021, highlights that retirees who continued to work after retirement increased by 420,000 in 2019 compared to those who had made the same choice in 2017. The increase mainly concerns northerners with low schooling.
The recent INPS annual report adds further contextual elements to this figure. According to the INPS, in fact, 32 percent of Italian pensioners (more than 5 million people) have retirement incomes of less than one thousand euros a month, a figure that risks plunging many of them, especially women, into a condition of absolute poverty, in a context of high inflation such as today. It is no coincidence that the Syndicate of Italian pensioners Spi Cgil, a few days ago, drew attention to the urgency of structural interventions in favor of pensioners, pointing out, for the uninitiated, that “they are not privileged”.
In recent years, there has been repeated talk of the alleged conflict between the generation born during the economic boom and that of contemporary young people, born in a context of precariousness, recession and poor work. More and more, however, this alleged conflict resembles a tragic convergence.
Wages are too low and pensions are too low: this is the crux of the matter. Urgent interventions are needed to increase both: pensions must be increased, the number of pensioners who receive the 14th grade must be increased, the minimum wage introduced and the citizenship income increased. It is atrocious to think that politics deals so little with both pensions and incomes, while many retirees, such as Donato Marti, return to work after the age of seventy to support themselves and lend a hand, when they can, to the new precarious generations.