AZ increases retirement age
AZ Medien's pension fund wants to raise the retirement age for employees to 66 at the beginning of 2018. Publisher Peter Wanner is against his company going it alone.
The increase in the retirement age makes sense if it is introduced throughout Switzerland, Wanner told the SDA news agency on Sunday. The board of directors will certainly discuss making the retirement age more flexible. The pension fund has taken the lead. What is decisive is how the company decides, Wanner added. The pension fund cannot dictate to the company what it has to do.
Whether AZ Medien will autonomously and prematurely increase the retirement age for its employees is therefore still open, according to Peter Wanner. The Board of Directors will decide on this at its meeting at the end of February 2017. Ultimately, it is a conflict of interest between the insured and the employees. If the retirement age is increased, the conversion rate will have to fall less; if the retirement age is maintained, the conversion rate will have to be reduced slightly more.
According to publisher Wanner, AZ Medien's pension fund is very healthy. But of course the board of trustees would have to consider how the fund would ensure the financing of pensions in the face of an ever-increasing life expectancy of the insured.
The decision of the AZ pension fund to increase the retirement age to 66 years was made against the background of the political discussion and in the assumption that the retirement age will be increased to this point by law throughout Switzerland. This was reported in the SonntagsZeitung. Within the mandatory pension scheme up to an income of 84,600 francs, the retirement age of 65 for men and 64 for women is anchored in law, labor law expert Thomas Geiser of the University of St. Gallen had told SonntagsZeitung. Beyond that, he said, pension funds are free. However, the implementation of a higher retirement age is complicated, he said. (SDA)
Photo: AZ Medien; G. Krischker
