A 49-year-old teacher was refused a loan by a bank despite being secured by her partner. It is cases like this that incite the chairwoman of the ÖVP senior citizens’ union, Ingrid Korosec. Due to age discrimination of older bank customers, there is now a voluntary agreement with the banking association to eliminate such disadvantages. Since then, the number of cases has declined, but age discrimination against bank customers still occurs. Therefore, there has already been a meeting with Justice Minister Alma Zadic and the Minister of Social Affairs, who is responsible for consumer protection, Rudi Anschober (both Greens), to take action against it if necessary with their own statutory regulation, Korosec announces with a view to the new year.
The ÖVP senior spouse, who turned 80 on November 22nd, emphasizes that it is only about age-related discrimination against bank customers. So not about cases in which there is not enough financial security. The senior representatives of the Chancellor Party no longer want to accept that older people are excluded from active life through discrimination. It should not be the case that older people no longer receive a credit card for reasons of age or that they only receive a lower credit card limit because of age.
Korosec announces that it will continue talks with banks in this regard. The same applies to insurance. If that does not work, equality should be ensured by law in order to prevent age discrimination by banks.
“The labor market for the elderly must be plowed”
The head of the ÖVP Senior Citizens Association also complains about another form of age discrimination on the labor market. Korosec criticizes people over the age of 50 “being deported”. More must be done against this. In this context she does not mention the Minister of Labor and Family Affairs, Christine Aschbacher, at all, and certainly not by name. In addition to the companies that have reservations about hiring people over 50 years of age, the criticism of the problems for older people on the labor market primarily hits the ÖVP department head.
Korosec puts it aggressively: “The labor market for older people in Austria is a field that needs to be tilled.” In their opinion, this requires a range of measures. So there should be a better form of partial retirement, the current one is “not sensible”. That is also part of the Minister of Labor Aschbacher. Accordingly, wage subsidies for companies would have to be used more so that older people get employment. Once again she is calling for the wage curves to be flattened because long-serving, older employees are currently too expensive for companies.
8.6 billion euros in unpaid work
In general, the ÖVP senior manager goes against the grain that pensioners and the older generation of politics and the media are only seen as a “cost factor” and portrayed as “rickety”. In fact, the federal government provides around 20 billion euros a year for the federal contribution to pensions and civil servants’ pensions from the budget. Korosec’s party, the ÖVP, of course, last at the end of November abolished the preferential, deduction-free hackers’ regulation from 62 and also the full pension increase in the first year after retirement, also with reference to the high costs in the express train without any appraisal in the National Council from 2022.
Korosec emphatically counters the costs with calculations that the older generation is an “economic factor” with billions in effects. In this context, she mentions the performance of older people over the age of 60 through voluntary work and informal care for relatives as an important point. 42 percent of those over the age of 60 would do unpaid work: for their children, for charitable organizations and also in the hospice sector. These activities alone would have a value of 2.5 billion euros a year.
Almost as much as the education budget
The importance is even greater in the care sector. Many people in need of care and assistance – there are around 460,000 recipients of care allowance in Austria – are looked after by relatives who are themselves older. With an average of 13 hours per week, this results in a total of 600 million hours of unpaid work per year. This corresponds to a value of 6.1 billion euros for older people per year, calculates the ÖVP senior citizens’ association. The two added together result in a total of 8.6 billion euros per year. As Korosec points out, this corresponds almost to the sum of the very important education budget per year.
In addition there is the income from taxes and duties. 2.3 million people in Austria or around a quarter of the population are older than 60 years. This group makes payments to the state in the form of duties and taxes of 17 billion euros per year: the majority through wage and income tax as well as social security contributions of 12 billion euros and five billion euros through sales tax.
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