Rola rozwiązania stosunku pracy w prawnym ujęciu prawa do emerytury
The role of termination of employment in legal concepts of the entitlement to old-age pension

Summary/Abstract: In the Polish public old-age insurance scheme requirements for the old-age pension payment are differentiated for employees and other groups of insured persons. The pensionable age is 60 (women) or 65 (men). However, in case of employees, the old-age pension entitlement is suspended, irrespective of income, if employment performed directly before the date of acquiring old-age pension right settled by a decision of the social security institution is continued without its prior termination. This solution results from political, judicial and theoretical discussions undertaken over many years and presented in this paper. The formal recognition of the old-age pension entitlement differs from its realisation. Thus, the contingency does not cover survival beyond a prescribed age as such, but it rather pertains to the termination of employment and similar events (i.e., transformation of the disability pension into old-age pension, application of the person concerned) which here are collectively referred to as “retirement.” The regulation was adopted in order to reduce the costs of benefits while enabling smooth replacement of older employees by younger ones, because at the same time, courts developed stricter antidiscriminatory case law on the admissibility of dismissals on the grounds of acquiring pension rights. Meanwhile, the labour market situation changed and fiscal or labour law solutions supporting the activity of senior workers should be correlated with the complex regulation of the old-age pension entitlement.

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