(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Whether I have thought about what I will receive in retirement? No, not really, and I'm not alone in that. Ask a school student, a student, and a young couple about the same, and the answer will be that there are other questions that are more urgent: Do I get a summer job this summer? How many hours can I work each month without losing a scholarship? Rent or buy? The list is long over concerns that come before the queue. Therefore, no one was surprised when Opinion presented a survey earlier this spring which showed that the younger you are, the less you are interested in retirement. Planning for a few months or years ahead of time is, for most tasks, big enough, and it simply won't be time to worry about a retirement life that lies 30-40 years in the future.
The AFP case turned my attention to my carefree future optimism. Calculation by calculation shows that the settlement between NHO, LO and the government gives an AFP scheme that is much worse than the old one. And equally scary is that the new AFP scheme turns out to be only the tip of the iceberg. For it is not just the new AFP that will give today's young people a solid pension reversal. The whole of the new pension reform means for us young people a smaller pension and longer earning time, in short.
In France, the Netherlands and Greece, millions demonstrated against similar attacks on their pensions. In Norway, pension reform was implemented before the election campaign in 2005. Just as with the new AFP scheme, this was done with the help of prevailing techniques and Orwellian news which enabled Jens Stoltenberg to say that everyone should receive more, while at the same time the total pension expenses should get smaller. There should be an alarm in people when Jens Stoltenberg says everyone should get more. This case is no exception, because in the new pension reform you will lose for every penny you do not earn. With that in mind, you may want to note a few things. We still have a gender-divided labor market, where women earn less than men and work more part-time. It is still such that one is discriminated against if one is called Ali and not Ola, and the labor market does not yet have enough room for those who cannot provide 110 percent. And now when we ourselves are to be our own pension savings box, even one year of study abroad will mean one year less pension earnings. In other words, it is no coincidence who will be the losers in the new system.
In today's political landscape, there is virtually no will to fight back on the pension reform. The only party that wants to drop the entire pension reform is Rødt, in addition to Frp, which thinks it is too kind. SV has no intentions of failing the pension reform and has with the rest of the red-green government now sneaked away from the government's promises of a full-fledged AFP, and thus destroyed the last bulwark the workers had against the cuts in National Insurance. The fight for AFP is still important, even after the disappointing result from the referendum in LO. An equally good AFP scheme as today will be able to shield thousands of workers from the worst pension cuts. Roar Flåthen assures us that in 2017 we can negotiate this again. My tip to Roar is that he will notice that young people will not wait ten years to do something.
Opinion's survey showed that young people care more about salaries than about pension schemes. I think the survey would have looked completely different if more young people were aware of how much they risk losing. The biggest losers with the new pension reform are without a doubt today's young workers. Retirement is important for young people. They just do not know about it yet.
