Einsmer - M7 sécurité citoyenne

For a new pact between generations

Presentations and agreements:

25 de Febrero de 2004
Protocolo Acuerdo Marco Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales. Ver Acuerdo (PDF)
Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 5:30 p.m.
Nº sesión 29: Non-permanent commission for monitoring and evaluating the agreements of the `Pacto de Toledo IX LEGISLATURA'
Ponencia de. D. José Antonio Gallego Soto, Representative of the foundation Pacto Generacional, to report on issues related to the purpose of the Commission

(Núm. Exp. 21/0005454/0000)

I am the experience, you are the time

The Generational Pact is a practical and tangible response to a strong intergenerational social demand. Young people need an environment that allows them to channel their human potential - evolutionarily greater, generation after generation -. On the other hand, the elderly need to find satisfactory ways to dump their life and professional experience accumulated for years, dignifying and doctorating their last latent stage. This exchange, between generations, will accelerate the individual and, therefore, collective development of our society.

For both generations, this will mean substantially reducing frustration, lack of expectations, fear of unknown situations, the feeling of uselessness, the acceleration of psychopathological and psychosocial processes, the anguish of life, individual and social apathy, etc.

Greater social and professional training for young people - through this system and the social return of the elderly, makes it possible to envision a new social order based on the acceleration of knowledge and the active participation of a much higher number of older people in productive and economic activity assuming a new social function.

Intergenerational Transference

FOR AN ACTIVE, SOLIDARY AND NOT MECHANICAL PACT BETWEEN GENERATIONS

The "Generational Pact" or "Intergenerational Pact" program is not a philosophical principle. It is true that, to EINSMER, it is a way of understanding the organization and identifying the assets of experience and knowledge. But also, it is a set of actions that aim to emphasize the importance of continuing to rely on the elderly, to establish mechanisms of "conscious intergerational solidarity", not "mechanics" like the current ones.

This means, for example, not extending the retirement age by decree, but instead of this, promoting the continuity of the work activity of the elderly, reformulating the role that, at a certain stage of their life, they can play. We must not continue, necessarily, more years doing the same.

It is possible, for example, that an older person can contribute more in professional training - establishing the appropriate transfer model in each case - than in the work function that develops in the pre-retirement age.

To deepen Garcinen's idea - by García-Nieto Paris - to reformulate new socially useful and economically viable occupations that favor the intergenerational transfer of vital and professional experience.

The act of pre-retirement should not be a burden for the State and the organizations. To this end, in 1995 we promoted the flexible retirement model, within the framework of the non-permanent Toledo Pact Commission on pensions. But always a model of "flexible retirement" supported by a modelable Strategic Plan and which we still claim today.

Why? - Hence to be aware of the act of intergenerational solidarity - because hypothetically it seems reasonable that if people are dignified - and not retired in their pejorative sense - the productive system and society that we have given, will improve. Only because the System is not an order, is the sum of the state in which people who form it are present.

And this means that a substantial part of the costs of the health and pension system will be optimized. The local economy - microeconomics or economy from our pocket - will consequently improve; education and productivity in our companies will increase -better capacity for competition of people and our organizations-, …

It is worthwhile then, to continue at the State and States level, a Program such as the Generational Pact.

Act of Constitution of the "Fundació Pacte Generacional"

Intergenerational solidarity

Contribution of Professor Antonio Marzal Fuentes to the Generational Pact Program.

A social security system, and, in a more concrete way, a social security system referred to the protection of old age - in retirement, or in the definitive retirement of worklife due to disability -, is no more than a great system of solidarity - the burdens of those who, for one reason or another, by age or disability, leave the work, definitively are assumed by others -, and a great system of intergenerational solidarity - the responsibility for the protection of the generation that retires from work, is assumed by the next generation, as it was by the previous generation--.

This has always been true in terms of reality. Always and in a spontaneous, biological-cultural way, the principle of intergenerational solidarity has morally regulated intergenerational protection: the best placed generation protects the one that is worse off; the active generation - the one that can protect -, the passive - that needs to be protected -.This is the expression of a systemic principle inscribed in the biological, cultural, or moral nature of man: that of the return, conscious or unconscious, to the generation now in need of protection from what it did with the previous one.

A social security system referred to the protection of the generation that withdraws from work is no more than the legal assumption of that biological, cultural or moral fact. The system of distribution -of charges and benefits- inscribed in the law since the late nineteenth century, does nomore thanregulate and implement with legal rules this system of intergenerational solidarity, which lived its most splendid stage in the economy of the immediate second postwar period.

The crisis of intergenerational solidarity

But precisely because of this, on the one hand because of the close correlation that has occurred in the facts between social protection and economic splendor, and on the other, by its unconscious, or almost unconscious, automatic functioning, the system of intergenerational solidarity entered into a deep crisis as soon as they changed, with the economic crisis of the 70s and with the cultural changes that accompanied it, the social and demographic conditions on which its operation was based during the splendor of the second postwar period.

With the economic crisis came the employment crisis, and both crises triggered the crisis of the financial system on which intergenerational solidarity was based. But, the necessary reactions were slow to arrive, and when they arrived, it took even longer to discover that the images of the automatism of their functioning with which we had lived until then, were more a mirage than a reality. A discovery that, at last, would force us to consider things as a cultural system -which is what it really was- rather than as a financial system -which was only the expression of that one-.-.

For an intergenerational pact

For this to happen, they would have to change not only things, but above all, attitudes. The first thing that would have to change is precisely those images of automatism with which the system apparently would have worked, with little awareness on our part, that what we had put in place was a system of intergenerational solidarity. Henceforth, intergenerational solidarity would have to learn to function as a conscious and founding pact, prior to the legal instrumental mechanisms, by which different generations would assume, one with respect to the other, their moral obligations, reciprocal and successive, of solidarity. The new intergenerational solidarity should be a conscious solidarity, morally assumed, and only then converted into a right. That is what it means, and that is the image, the proposal of an intergenerational pact.

On the other hand, and in order for this founding pact of the new system to function as what it is, as a moral reality, not just a mechanical reality, it will have to be extended not only to the classical protection of a generation delimited with precise borders of the another, but also to all the interstices that occur in the events between successive generations. To the interstices of the classical protection, by which the retreating generation relies on the one that enters - unidirectionally -, and the new interstices in which the transmission is given to the generation that comes from the experience of the work which is leaving.

This relay of generations, thus conceived and now regulated by the intergenerational pact, will thus be made more gradual than today - ddelayed retirement in different forms of work, coexistence of retirement and certain forms of work ... -, more integrative - - the retiring generation does so by transferring its experience to the next generation as a morally due return - and more effective - new attitudes created by the intergenerational pact will necessarily create new rules that make possible the survival of the financial system, without which the exercise of this solidarity is not really possible-.