Who said what about the retirement age on Labour Day?

From the Labour Day debate about Denmark’s retirement age to the culprit behind disappearing trees in Odder, our weekly column Inside Denmark looks at some of the stories we’ve been talking about this week.

Labour Day battle over retirement age

On Thursday this week, leaders from Denmark’s left wing and left-of-centre parties gave speeches around the country, in keeping with May 1st tradition.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen talked about bringing back Denmark’s ship building tradition, as the country gears itself up for military spending which will include acquiring new Navy vessels. It will also need ships for civilian use like in research and for its increased presence in the Arctic.

The PM didn’t manage to make this the dominant theme of Labour Day though, with trade unions and opposition left-wing parties using the occasion to mark out their stances on Denmark’s retirement age.

That seemed to be reflected in the media coverage of the day, with broadcaster DR, for example, running a story featuring a 65-year-old builder who will be able to retire in two years, and his twentysomething colleague who will be working until he is 74 if the current schedule for gradually raising the retirement age holds out.

Denmark’s plans for gradually raising the retirement age have been set more or less in stone since a 2006 political agreement, on which a lot of economic planning is based.

Frederiksen was in fact the first party leader to say that the plan should be reviewed, something there is growing public sentiment for given the very high retirement ages now in prospect for the youngest members of Denmark’s workforce.

Last summer, when the PM said she would favour revisiting the 2006 agreement, her comments came as something of a surprise.

It now appears that the parties on her left could hold her to those comments and overtake her on the issue, if the speeches and comments that emerged around Labour Day are to be taken as a yardstick.

Politicians weren’t alone in discussing pensions on Labour Day. Trade union leaders also weighed on the debate in their own speeches.

“We need a fair path to retirement in Denmark. Can the retirement age just keep rising and rising and rising? No, it can’t,” Morten Skov Christiansen, president of trade union confederation FH (Fagbevægelsens Hovedorganisation) said at Fælledparken in Copenhagen.

“Four out of five wage earners under the age of 50 don’t believe they’ll be able to stay in the workforce until retirement,” he noted.

Frederiksen said earlier on Thursday that a new model for the future retirement age must be in place before 2030, when parliament is due to vote on the matter again.

“I’ve said it needs to be in place before 2030, and there’s still plenty of time,” she said.

“I generally think we need to bring into the pension debate that there are big differences in the kind of working lives people have,” she said.

Under the terms of the 2006 agreement, parliament must vote at regular intervals to approve the planned progression of the retirement age. That is next due to happen in 2030, when it will vote on the state pension age for 2045.

The Socialist People’s Party (SF) called for a clearer plan from Frederiksen’s Social Democrats.

“It seems we’ll have to wait until the next election to hear what the Social Democrats plan to do after that,” SF’s leader Pia Olsen Dyhr said according to news wire Ritzau.

“I think that creates far too much uncertainty,” she said, adding that SF is happy “to help” the Social Democrats create a “fair pension”.

Mystery of tree disappearances solved

The people of the town of Odder south of Aarhus were reportedly “furious” in September last year, after 31 trees were cut down and stolen from the town.

The removal of the large trees was no easy undertaking, and East Jutland Police said at the time it was “aware of who allegedly cut down the trees”, but was determining whether a crime had been committed.

The felled trees in Odder had one thing in common: they were all located either on or very close to land owned by local estate owner Johan Koed Jørgensen of Aakær Gods.

Broadcasters DR and TV2 Østjylland have both reported on the matter, with police having filed one charge of theft and six separate charges of serious vandalism related to the felled trees, which have now reached a total number of 90. Compensation claims could run into several million kroner.

Lawyers for the landowner have admitted that responsibility for the felled trees lies with the manor, claiming they were removed due to needs related to maintenance of agricultural land.

Some of the trees “pose a safety risk,” one of Koed Jørgensen’s lawyers, René Offersen, told DR. This could be due to rot in the trees or because they hang over the fields, the broadcaster writes.

Some of the felled trees were outside of the manor land and are therefore subject to the police charges.

Odder Municipality meanwhile believes trees that were felled near the Odder Å and Rævs Å streams, located on the estate owner’s land, are protected under the Nature Protection Act. That means they are not allowed to be cut down.

The municipality is demanding the landowner restore the natural surroundings to their former state.

Who said what about the retirement age on Labour Day?

Tags: