From FDP Chairman Philipp Müller in an interview with the NZZ am Sonntag
Says Mueller. "In general as you near retirement, you need less money than at the stage of family formation. Consequently, their wages could also drop a little."

I guess he has not noticed how many voters are 50 & over?
I suppose he has also not noticed the days of the nuclear family (man, wife, 2 children) are declining?

I guess he also hasn't noticed how many parents of young kids are 50 and over these days.

Silly sod.

Just did a Google & found the "silly sod" is himself over 50.

I missed the part in the article where he volunteered to take a wage reduction himself

I took my wage reductions when I was young. Another pearl of political wisdom. Why do politicians blurt out everything without thinking about?

He has a point though.
For years the politic has been to give over 50ties all sorts of benefits, longer holidays, wage rises, better deals on the franchises etc..
These perks have lead to the point where the over 50ties are too much trouble to employ, well you get the wage cut automatically when you can't find work as soon as you reach your sell by date.

If it stops companies from firing the the 50+, then yes, as Slammer says, he has a quite unfortunate point.

Yeah, but those things are partly rewards for loyalty to the company over many years - something that the youngsters of today seem to know nothing about. And I wonder if he's even thought about how many kids have returned home to live with their parents because they can't get jobs. Plus, given the lack of retirement planning that gets done early on, over 50s probably need even more as they suddenly realise they have no pension assets to speak of and rush to fill the gap.

marton, yes, let's hope he applies his words to himself as well. Given that his salary is probably at least 6 times more than his workers I reckon he could make do with a lot less now he's passed the 50 mark.

And I guess that he hasn't noticed that many 50-somethings are supporting their elderly parents.

Often in addition to supporting their minority age and adult children. 50-somethings are the 'sandwich' generation.

Like many of his generation, OH ist still supporting quite a few people. The younger generation have not yet found their feet and still need our help, the older generation, whose finances took quite a hit in the crisis, need our help, as do relatives of our generation who have lost jobs with no new prospects in sight.

The years between 50 and retirement are some of the most costly.

But what really angers me about this ill-conceived statement is the notion that one should be paid based on what one needs rather than on what one deserves from one's hard work. (Where have I heard that before?)

OH works 80+ hour weeks - and what he does ensures that younger employees still have jobs to go to in the morning.

Bugger off, youSome of us struggled for years to reach the prosperity level we now have, being still employed and around that age, and now want to reap the rewards. Where would be the incentive to succeed at work if all you're going to get in return is falling salaries as you get older?

Completely daft idea.

How about if Switzerland stops generalizing based on averages and start operating on what actually is? Let's stop assuming women want to stay home, men love to work and that 50 year olds are established with children already in university. They could easily make the tax system based on what is actually going on in the home!

Ace1, that's downright insensitive !!!!!!

Perhaps you've never been through a downsizing or a restructuration, good for you, but that doesn't mean that it's not a reality for other fully qualified, educated, multi-lingual, hard-working people with responsibilities who just happen to be 50+.

I won't be 50 for quite a while yet, but still.. we'll all get there, so a little solidarity for those who see things from a different perspective, not because they want to, but because they had to !

Swiss politicians seem to do a fantastic job when they work as a Borg collective, it's when they start having a go at being individuals that things seem to start going pear-shaped.

I didn't see anything insensitive about what he said. Other than "bugger off, you" of course.

How about just taking everybody's earnings, put it all into a big pot and redistribute according to need? I wonder if that's ever been tried?

Eh? Not at all.
I don't see the connection.

Oh, hang on, you're following on from whoever suggested that generally higher earnings for older people make a barrier to employment for the over-50s, are you? Would anyone care to show any evidence of this, cos I think it's a nonsense?

Declining? Gone and dusted more like...

+1

Not so sure. I don't know if it is a barrier is you are already employed. However, if you are unemployed, getting a job when you are older and especially 50+ is harder - whether this is linked to perks or not, I don't know.

Data from OECD show the following for 2011:
15-24 yo - 39.5% employment
25-54 yo - 75.4%
55-64 yo - 54.4%

source: http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/f...Type=text/html

What is hard to say is whether the older folks have taken early retirement. Also these data show employment; what would be more valuable would be data which show unemployment (i.e. those seeking work). Data from 2009 OECD (sorry all I could find at the mo):

15-24 yo - 11.9%
25-54 yo - 4.9%
55-84 yo - 4.0%

Figures for CH are 7.1 / 3.1 / 3.1%

Which suggests things aren't too bad when you are older in terms of employability...

http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset...nce-2008-10-en


*with respect to employement age!

__________________
Never let right or wrong get in the way of a good opinion

It is called Communism & collapsed.

Problem with "redistribute according to need" is it rapidly becomes unfair. Hypothetical example;

• person with large family stays at home to share the load but gets large income according to need.
• Single person works 90+ hours a week but gets low income due to low need.

Question; How long will the single person continue like this?
& when all the hard workers with low needs stop working hard then the system will slowly collapse into debt.

Or to put it another way; if you get paid according to your need then what incentive is there to work hard/well/efficiently.....

I think he was clearly being ironic, marton...

Nope I'm reacting to your "some of us have struggled for years"

and ?

All of us struggle for years.

There's no security or promise anywhere that striving hard will keep anybody from need.
So if there is a very unfortunate solution to keep people employed then so be it, not for the reasons the politician is on about, but for what Slammer said.

I also don't abide to the insinuation in "some of us have struggled" as if it were particularly deserving, in the sense that those without employment haven't struggled and thus haven't deserved.

Well obviously wage increases or reductions should not be based on the needs but on the qualifications/work of the employee, but reality in Switzerland is that salaries are very much based on perceived needs, which until today strongly correlates with seniority. So the older you are and the larger your family is, the more your employer will pay you. Younger employees without family with the same qualifications will almost always earn less.

And because older employees keep earning more until retirement even if they keep doing the same job, the suggestion to establish a new culture where salary cuts are not automatically considered a reason to quit are indeed sensible.

none of the very many problems hitting Europe and North America will be resolved until the baby boomer generation exits the workforce and begins dying off in earnest. I don't mean this as a wish that people start dying, btw, but it is an undeniable fact that the workforce and other age demographics are horribly out of whack presently and we are faced with younger generations that will spend their entire productive lives either unemployed or underemployed. and I have absolutely zero sympathy for anybody who lost their shirt and/or retirement with the various market and housing bubbles of the last 10 years, especially since my generation and younger generations are the ones who will be paying for the social benefits of those who failed to adequately anticipate for their retirement, especially in the US.

the single greatest problem facing nearly every western country these days is youth unemployment.

Since CG brought up the boomers, here's an old article I just came across last week that has food for thought. Who Destroyed the Economy - the Case Against the Baby Boomers. Not saying I agree with all of it, but there are some interesting points.

"Every generation blames the one before, and all of their frustrations come beating on your door..."