Hilda Van Cauwenberg is a Belgian retiree who is 69 years old and, now that she has started collecting her pension, she has found certain irregularities to which she is trying to respond. He has questioned the functioning of the pension system in his country upon verifying that the equivalent to Social Security in Belgium (the National Pension Office) has not taken into account the contributions from the time she worked as an administrator at the Ministry of Transport.
In an interview with the newspaper Het Laastste Nieuws and collected by Focus, explains that in his working life there are certain contribution periods with gaps. It highlights that they are those in which the job was linked to “job figures that have already disappeared.”
To understand it well, she explains that she started working in the 1970s at the Ministry of Transport and that, when she signed her first employment contract, she did so as a ‘busy unemployed’. In Belgium, an employed unemployed person is one who has an active employment contract, but it is temporary.
In her case, she applied as a candidate for an administrative job within a public program that helped unemployed people get a job. Before entering, they told him that those years would count towards his retirement pension. “And I didn’t ask any more questions,” he laments.
His initial retirement pension was 1,410 euros per month
When Hilda requested retirement in 2017, she found that her initial pension was 1,410 euros per month, “today it is approximately 1,800 euros” but she also realized a problem. The period in which he had been working for the Ministry of Transport (5 years) had barely influenced the calculation of his benefit.
“When they tell you that those years count towards the pension, you assume that they mean that they have an economic influence, but now for me they are lost years.” According to the pensioner, she is not the only one affected but she is the one who wanted to tell the media.
In Belgium there are differences between the years that can be counted for the purposes of pension entitlement and those that directly affect its amount. This, for example, is seen in countries like Spain where there are similar periods that count towards completing the contribution career, although they do not always do so with the same salary base as if one is working.
An economist responds: “to say that this time is wasted seems exaggerated to me.”
The well-known economist Stijn Baert has stated that although the story of the retiree is interesting, describing those years as “lost time” is “exaggerated” because “they are taken into account for the global calculation and because they were covered with unemployment benefits, although in this case they imply lower contributions.”