A member of the German Council of Economic Experts has proposed a formula to split additional years that a person can expect to live between working life and retirement, triggering opposing political reactions.

The mechanism, devised by Veronika Grimm, automatically links a person’s retirement age to their life expectancy, meaning that people would work longer.

“The formula [to link the retirement age to life expectancy] in the future could be: ’if life expectancy increases by one year, two-thirds of the year would be added to the employment [phase] and one-third to retirement,” Grimm said in a media interview. She added that it should not apply to people with health problems.

Grimm has also warned of the trend towards early retirement that leads in her view to a shortage of skilled workers.

”We have to ensure that people want to and are able to work longer, that the actual retirement age increases,” she added in the interview.

Experts in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate (BMWK) have also raised doubts relating to the early retirement option called Rente mit 63, which can cause the number of contributors to decrease, at the same time exacerbating the shortage of skilled workers.

According to the experts, it is mainly well-trained, above-average earners and healthier people who take advantage of the rule, they said in a letter to the BMWK.

Under the Rente mit 63 rule, people can retire before reaching the statutory retirement age, which is gradually increasing to 67 by 2031, if they collect a minimum of 35 years of contributions – with their pensions reduced – or after collecting 45 years of contributions, without receiving a pensions cut.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the governing coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberal Party (FDP) are rejecting the idea of increasing the retirement age.

”I am firmly convinced that we no longer need to keep raising the retirement age,” Scholz said during a ’town hall’ address in Erfurt in the state of Thuringia.

“Anyone who leaves school at the age of 17 has five decades of work ahead. I think that’s enough,” he said, adding that employees should have the option of working longer if they chose to do so, but not because they have to.

Member of the parliament (Bundestag) and general secretary of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) Carsten Linnemann warned against making sweeping changes to the retirement age.

“There are people who can work longer with increasing life expectancy. But there are also many who can no longer work at the age of 60 for physical reasons” Linnemann said.

The MP for FDP, Pascal Kober, underlined that changes to the retirement age should come with transitional periods for people to plan their retirement phase, adding that it would be important to cut red tape for people who want to work longer.

“The Greens and SPD must give up their blockade here and work with us to find pragmatic solutions,” he said.

According to a spokesperson for the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (BMAS), however, reforming the retirement age is not part of the pension policy plans of the current governing coalition, Tagesspiegel newspaper reported.

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