(Finance) – Reducing the average age of Italian teachers and school staff is an essential objective: you need to retire at 60, with free redemption of your degree, and certainly not like now when you can leave your job at almost 70. To say it is Marcello Pacifico, president of the autonomous union Anief. For Pacific “it is necessary to implement the pension advance in schools, because it is unthinkable not to recognize the presence of high burnout for those who work in educational institutions resulting from work-related stress”.
The trade unionist therefore invites the interested staff and citizens who want the good of the school and its staff, primarily the students, to sign the online petition through which for staff working in schools yes asks for retirement at 60 and the free redemption of the years of university education: in a few weeks the petition has collected over 75 thousand signatures.
“We have seen – he declares Pacific – that there are rules that allow Armed Forces personnel to be able to retire at 59 with maximum contributions and it is not clear why, instead, in school, we have to have more than 230 thousand over 60s who continue to work, increasing that gap generational among students compared to teachers and school staff. It is clear that we must recognize that, even in schools, it is appropriate to leave work at 60 and with maximum contributions, as happened before”.
According to the leader of Anief “it would be a sign of recognition for school staff, together with the fact that army officers are still entitled to the free redemption of their training years of the degree as is also the case in Germany. Also in this case – continues Pacific – it is understandable why in school you have to pay more than 7-8 thousand euros for each year to redeem a qualification, which is then used to access training”. The free recognition for social security purposes – underlines the Anief leader – “would allow also to be able to increase the number of graduates and it would also be an important measure to enhance the degree, in a country where unfortunately for 15 years there have been fewer and fewer students completing university. This proposal, among other things, had already been put forward by the former INPS president Raffale Tridico”.
President Anief has calculated that for this operation “they are needed resources of at least one and a half billion euros, but it is also an investment in the younger generations and, above all, for school staff, who are responsible for building a more just and equitable society. It is therefore important to valorise the staff”, concludes Pacifico, recalling that the union “launched a petition which collected more than 75 thousand signatures in a month to convince the political decision maker to valorise those who work in the school”.