(de-news.net) – Chancellery Minister Thorsten Frei (CDU) has expressed support for a policy approach that would more closely link the statutory retirement age to the total number of contribution years an individual accrues over the course of their working life. He was reported to have regarded it as self-evident that not all workers could reasonably be expected to remain in the labor force for identical periods, given the wide variation in occupational demands and individual capacities. On this basis, he was said to have argued that establishing a more individualized and flexible framework for determining retirement eligibility had become an unavoidable necessity. By voicing this position, Frei effectively provided significant political reinforcement to a proposal advanced by the SPD-affiliated economist Jens Südekum, by SPD General-Secretary Tim Klüssendorf, and by Lower Saxony’s SPD Minister-President, Olaf Lies, thereby bridging a degree of cross-party policy engagement on a topic of growing socio-economic urgency. Federal Labor Minister Bärbel Bas (SPD) had also stated that she could see considerable merit in the idea.
Frei further clarified that the physical and psychological demands associated with certain occupations can place earlier and more substantial limits on an individual’s ability to remain employed, while other fields—particularly those typically described as experience-based professions—generally do not impose comparable constraints. He stressed that the age at which individuals first enter the workforce should also be treated as a meaningful factor in determining retirement timelines, reflecting the reality that career trajectories and cumulative occupational exposure vary widely. He concluded that the traditional intergenerational funding model—under which younger workers subsidize the pensions of older cohorts—no longer functioned reliably. This was due in part to the ratio of active contributors to retirees having fallen to approximately two to one, combined with the fact that average pension payments now extend for at least two decades, thereby challenging the sustainability of long-standing assumptions about workforce and retirement balance.
In light of these dynamics, Frei asserted that proactive government intervention would be essential to prevent social insurance contributions from rising from their current level of just under 42 percent to over 48 percent in the near future. He highlighted that social expenditures were increasing at a pace that outstripped overall economic growth, a divergence he argued threatened long-term social cohesion and the equitable functioning of the welfare state. Frei’s analysis positioned the issue not merely as a fiscal concern but as a broader structural challenge, emphasizing the need for adaptive policy measures that account for demographic shifts, labor market realities, and the varying capacities of workers across sectors.
