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After a lifetime of working, one hopes to be able to access retirement pension and enjoy a well-deserved retirement from work, after so many years of sacrifice. However, it is a reward that does not reach everyone, as an Italian from Bergamo learned who, after being fired, discovered that she had never been registered and, therefore, had not contributed in the last 25 years. An event that prevents you from meeting the requirements to collect the pension.
“My ex-wife and I had a pharmacy: it was a family business and she was the owner. I worked there for 25 years, from 1975 to 2000, until she fired me without giving me compensation nor pay my contributions. That’s why I was forced to go back to work, even now that I’m 78 years old,” this pharmacist told the media ‘Fanpage.it’ last year, where he decided to tell his story in the first person.
Retirees who receive 3,003.94 euros per month as a Social Security pension
Social Security adds one and a half days of contributions for each day worked to the discontinued employees to calculate their retirement pension, but with the limit of one calendar year.
It was 50 years ago when he started working in the pharmacy of his now ex-wife and, 25 years later, the bitter discovery came: “immediately after I stopped working at the pharmacy, I realized that they had not paid my contributions.” Thus, at 53 years old, he realized that years and years of work, facing the pension, were not going to be of any use. But how did he not notice before? “I hadn’t worried before because, when things are going well, you don’t think there could be anything wrong,” he confessed.
“We are talking about hundreds of thousands of euros at stake”
After the fateful discovery, this 78-year-old pharmacist from Bergamo began working as a freelancer in companies owned by friends and acquaintances to support his new family. When the events occurred, he went to the unions, but they told him that nothing could be done, since the contributions “had not been paid on time.”
After that, at first, he did not want to file a complaint, but he has changed his mind: “In the last ten years, my life has changed. I have had another son to whom I would like to leave something,” he explained to the aforementioned media. Likewise, he assured that he no longer had any contact with the former pharmacy where he worked: “when they told me that I no longer had the right to anything, I no longer heard from them. There is a lot of resentment, because I had nothing: we are talking about hundreds of thousands of euros at stake. It is not an easy story. In all this time I have tried to rebuild my life and forget, but what it has left me is a scandalous legacy.”
That legacy is the impossibility of being able to access a pension and being forced to continue working despite being 78 years old: “My legs still support me and I manage to work a few hours in friends’ pharmacies. But they are improvised situations: I work as a freelancer with a VAT number and I do not have a stable contract, but with a little effort I manage to support my family,” he concluded.