The U.S. government is now considering raising the age of retirement from the 65-67 year range to 70. House Minority Leader John Boehner raised the issue specifically in June. In February, President Obama appointed a “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” which is charged with “identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run” and is widely expected to recommend such a measure.
 Mass protest in France against pension ‘reform’ |
Whatever the outcome of the upcoming elections, a recommendation from Obama’s “bipartisan” commission to raise the age of retirement will likely win support from Democrats and Republicans alike.
For millions of U.S. workers who lived as adults after World War II, years of labor and toil carried with them the promise of a secure retirement, of some chance to spend the later years of their lives resting, pursuing personal interests and spending time with friends and family.
This gain, part of the Social Security Act and its amendments, was passed by the Roosevelt administration during the short-lived mid-1930s upturn that followed the deepest economic crisis ever in the capitalist world. It was won thanks to a massive U.S. labor upsurge in the context of a decades-long struggle for justice by workers in the United States and elsewhere.
Retirement insurance had been a key reform demand of the workers’ movement in Europe; guaranteed retirement in the Soviet Union was a further inspiration. The success of the Soviet Union’s five-year plans and other social gains of the Russian Revolution further radicalized U.S. workers and helped induce concessions from the Roosevelt administration to “save capitalism.”
For its success in improving the lives of workers, though, Social Security has been under attack from the very beginning. Real threats to it emerged in the 1990s, when capitalist politicians began cagily suggesting that, rather than have payroll taxes go into the Social Security trust fund, portions of those taxes could be invested in the stock market. This would directly benefit corporations and large stockholders but would place workers even more at the mercy of capitalism’s boom-bust cycle. President Bush considered legislation to that end, but the immediate outcry against any such efforts to privatize Social Security led to his scrapping of the plan.
Capitalist politicians know that directly attacking Social Security is electoral suicide—workers instinctively fight for their own benefits. Such has been the case in France and Greece, two countries with historically strong working-class movements.
In France, the right-wing Sarkozy government passed a law that raised the age of retirement from 60 to 62; the unions and political left immediately announced strikes and rallies in opposition, and the fierce struggle continues.
In Greece, a country devastated by the international debt crisis, vicious anti-worker austerity measures, which include benefit cuts in addition to major increases in the age of retirement, sparked even more widespread and militant strikes and demonstrations.
In both countries, workers young and old joined together to fight for the preservation of their hard-won benefits. For younger workers, increases in the age of retirement mean fewer available jobs for themselves and a decreased quality of life for their elders. For older workers, increases in the retirement age can be dangerous to health and shorten life expectancy.
As demonstrated in an August 2010 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, millions of older workers hold physically demanding jobs or jobs with difficult work conditions. These include 37 percent of male workers over age 58, a percentage that grows among workers of color and those with lower levels of education. “Many older workers are in jobs that require substantial physical effort, jobs that may not afford them the option of working into their 70s in order to get full retirement benefits,” said Hye Jin Rho, author of the report.
Socialist countries have given us examples of how to handle retirement. The Soviet Union allowed male workers to retire at 60 and female workers at 55, with life-long retirement income based on wages in the last 12 months of work. Cuba, despite constant attacks by imperialism, has only as a result of the adverse effects on its planned economy of the global capitalist crisis and ongoing depression increased the retirement age from 60 to 65 over several years.
The capitalist U.S. government, which operates only in the interests of the rich, would like nothing more than to smash yet another gain won by workers, forcing us to work for the profits of the wealthy until we die. Workers need to struggle diligently against this attack and all others until the capitalist system itself is overthrown and socialism is put in its place.
