Czech Labor Ministry: Retirement is based on income, not skin color

The Czech Labor and Social Affairs Ministry (MPSV) has recently noted an increasing number of e-mails being sent as “spam” which allege that Roma are given some sort of advantage when retirement pensions are calculated. Part of this e-mail reads as follows:

“A working person who makes an average of CZK 15 000 per month (which most do) receives a retirement pension calculated on the basis of that amount. However, a Rom who has never worked and never paid a single crown into the social insurance system, who has been fed by the state through various welfare benefits – this ‘discriminated’ fellow-citizen receives a retirement pension calculated on the basis of the average wage in the Czech Republic, and that, esteemed fellow-citizens, is CZK 24 000 per month. So who wants to talk about discrimination here????????”

This information does not correspond to reality. MPSV considers it essential to correct the record:

The conditions for the right to retirement insurance – to a bereavement pension, a disability pension, or an old-age pension – and the rules for calculating such insurance are established by Law No. 155/1995 Coll., on retirement insurance, as amended. One of the main principles of this law is that people must have been insured for the required amount of time in order to be awarded retirement. As far as an old-age pension is concerned, the person must also be of retirement age. The length of insurance is measured by the length of income-earning activity (work), and the amount of the retirement itself depends on how long one has worked and how high one’s income was.

Every pension, even retirement pensions, in the Czech pension system has two components, the base rate and the adjustable rate. The base is the same for all kinds of pensions (irrespective of length of insurance and income level). It is currently CZK 2 170 per month. The adjustable rate of retirement pension depends on the length of insurance and the amount of income the insured earned during what is called the determination period prior to the pension being awarded. The determination period for pensions awarded in the year 2010 is the years 1986 – 2009.

Citizens of Roma origin are neither advantaged nor disadvantaged in the calculation of retirement pensions. The same rules apply to them as apply to all clients of the Czech pension system. MPSV does not know the author of these fraudulent e-mails, and the signatures using the MPSV letterhead that have turned up in some of the spammed e-mails are an abuse of publicly available contact information.

You can find detailed information on pensions on the website of the Czech Labor and Social Affairs Ministry at http://www.mpsv.cz/cs/3 and on the web pages of the Czech Social Security Administration, which determines and pays out the majority of pensions in the Czech Republic, at http://www.cssz.cz/cz/duchodove-pojisteni/.