Fenprof asks parliament to review the law on pension reduction

The National Teachers’ Federation (Fenprof) filed a petition in Parliament on Friday asking for a review of the 2006 law because it contains a clause that reduces the amount of pensions awarded to workers.

“It’s an old struggle, but now it’s felt more strongly,” trade unionist Helena Gonçalves told Luce before handing over the petition to the vice president of the Assembly of the Republic, which will be discussed in plenary session because it has more than four thousand signatures.

The law in question is Law 53-B of 2006, which says it is “unfair because it reduces pensions for life” because the diploma “prevents the renewal of pensions in the year of retirement and the following year, resulting in the loss of the opportunity to acquire power for all pensioners.”

The law stipulates that “only pensions that were updated more than one year ago on the effective date of the annual increase are updated.” In other words, on January 1 of this year, pensions assigned in 2023 were no more than one year old and therefore were not updated, Helena Gonçalves explained.

A former primary school teacher says pensioners have gone two years without a raise. The problem is more acute now because the increases have always been very low and barely noticeable in recent years.

“But now they’re starting to get a little bit better and eventually that’s having an impact,” he explained.

The regulation that increased pensions last year (from 3.9% to 4.8%) only applied to pensions assigned before 2022. pockets, which in 2022 was 8.7%, and in 2023 – 4.3%,” he said.

Also this year, a new regulation determined that the increase would only apply to pensions awarded before 2023, so workers who retired or will retire in 2023 were not eligible for the pension increase, even if their pension was awarded on January 2: “They lost purchasing power in 2023 and will lose it this year,” lamented a former primary school teacher.

During the legislative campaign, Fenprof asked for meetings with parliamentary groups, but Helena Gonçalves says the leaders were received “only by the PCP, the Bloc de Esquerda, Livre and the PSD”, to whom they handed over a document with a long history of pensioners and petitions to reconsider paragraphs.

Helena Goncalves is retired but continues to work for Fenprof, and the petition submitted to Parliament this Friday applies to all pensioners “from both the public and private sector”.