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In my feedback “40 years of contributions!” on www.pensions.gov.mt, I indicated that one needs to work for about 75,000 hours in order to retire at x age. Although this is an estimated figure, I still wish to explain how I got to it.
After eliminating vacation leave and public holidays, I considered the normal work year to be 47 weeks. Multiply by 40 hours (a week) and then again by 40 years (of contributions). The result would be in the range of 75,000 hours!
You must understand that such a proposal has to be in the form of a range, ex. between say 74,000 to 75,500 hours entitles you to retire at 63 (instead of 65). Some people in Malta abuse of sick leaves, but on the other hand you cannot penalise a person who throughout his whole working career only took about 100 days sick. This is therefore, a great incentive to increase productivity, the buzzword so often used nowadays.
This system also catches certain types of glorified employees that have salary scale structures! On the other hand, however, we cannot categorise self-employed who work less than 40 hours a week with this type of reasoning, as these people do not have leave and normal sick entitlement as the others.
My thinking of the “more hours you spend at work, the earlier you retire”, is based on the same approach applied for the pre-retirement leave for public service workers, as agreed by all the major unions!
Categorising workers according to number of hours worked is not impossible with today’s modern methods of punctuality that employers are requesting, such as punch clocks, cameras, palm readers, etc. However, categorising workers on the level of hardship, as the GWU is requesting, is a bit impossible because everyone will claim that he/she has a hard job. How are you going to measure physical hardship? Do you measure the degree of spinal curvature or do you count the number of white hairs? And what about mental fatigue and stress which can often be worse than physical exhaustion? We rely on medical certificates, and thus open the gates of abuse!
Let fairness prevail!
Charles Micallef
Fgura
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