Early retirement file: List of painful trades and professions to be drafted by mid-February 2017

While the retirement-related issue has provoked many acrimonious debates and free-wheeling comments, the definition of the list of “painful trades and professions” is expected to be finalized by mid-February 2017, according to a senior member of the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA), Mr Habouk Ferhat.

Mr Harbouk’s latest statement to “Echorouk” came at a time when several professional corporations, each in its turn, claimed to hold jobs that are considered “painful”, such as education, agriculture, transportation, Industry, mining, petroleum and local assemblies and even journalism. 

Starting from this, the General Union of Algerian Workers (UGTA) has set up a commission made of 45 experts to draft a text to pinpoint the category of hard trades and professions who will benefit exclusively from early retirement. 

In drawing up the relevant list, the Trade Union Confederation focused on three criteria: overtime, exposure to diseases and climatic conditions (temperature).

Nevertheless, workers in “dangerous” occupations will continue to benefit from the retirement without age condition, recently said the advisor on economic and social affairs to the secretary general of the UGTA, Mr Mohamed Lakhdar Badreddine. He cited as an example mining workers, railway workers and workers in blast furnaces and oil drilling sites. 

The same official believes that maintaining retirement without any age limit had become a serious risk to the financial balance of the already-ailing National Pension Fund (CNR). In this sense, “Ordinance n°97-13 of 31 May 1997 setting retirement without any age limit, cannot be regarded as a permanent asset, it is rather a transient gain for a cyclical situation”, he emphasized. 

“Nowadays there are more pensioners than active workers compared to previous years”, he argued, while calling by the same token for what he termed: “a wise vision of the future to safeguard the financial balance of the CNR, as well as the rights of the Algerian pensioners”. 

In this vein, he regretted the position of the other unions which said they were “opposed” to the abolition of retirement without any age limit, pointing out that in all countries the retirement age is staggered, as in England (67 years) or in France (62 years), whereas in Algeria, where the population is rather young, the starting retirement age is 50 years. 

If retirement with no age condition now combines with the past, the legal retirement age does not change. It is to be maintained at 60 years, he explained.