Hans-Jürgen Urban, managing board member of IG Metall:
“Good company pensions are important. The new law can help low earners also benefit from a company pension.
However, a new regulation in the law that restricts the collection of additional pension points in the statutory pension fund is absolutely incomprehensible and harmful. Today, insured people under the age of 50 can in principle protect themselves against possible pension reductions with extra payments. The coalition wants to ban this in the future and only allow older people. The correspondingly amended paragraph [187a paragraph 1a in SGB VI] was cheated into the law through the back door without any public debate. This prevents unions from expanding an important provision for those insured in statutory pension insurance through collective agreements.
Politicians call on people to close their gaps in care and then close existing options for additional provision. Promising pension options for employees in companies without company pensions are being massively restricted. Obviously, the aim of the traffic light is to remove pension insurance providers from the ‘competition’ for good additional provision and to one-sidedly privilege high-risk, stock-based provision and the insurance industry.