The head of the Raiffeisen Group’s Valida pension fund, Martin Sardelic, is pushing for improvements to company pension funds. He noticed that the new Finance Minister Magnus Brunner (ÖVP) wanted to take up the issue of pension provision. “We see that very positively,” said Sardelic on Thursday in an online press conference. The pension fund has commissioned an opinion poll from Spectra to substantiate the concerns.
State provisions will “always be important”, but “the effectiveness of this first pillar will not be maintained,” said Sardelic. Accordingly, 70 percent of those surveyed expect that they will not be able to live well on the state pension alone. Young people and women in particular are skeptical here. However, 70 percent also stated that they were unable to estimate how high the available amount will be in retirement.
Valida deduces from this that company pensions should have a higher priority than state pensions, as is the case in other countries. The survey participants also considered this second pillar of pension provision to be an important issue.
One million have company pension schemes
Not all companies have pension funds. Currently, only around one million Austrians, that is around 23 percent of the workforce, are entitled to a company pension. One of Valida’s demands on politicians is to include more employees via a general pension fund contract. The social partners should also include pension funds in collective agreements as an obligation for employers.
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