The Lega’s proposed text to make the transfer of 25% of the TFR to supplementary pensions mandatory is ready. The aim of the measure is to guarantee better pensions especially to young workers. The draft of the initiative wanted by undersecretaries Claudio Durigon and Federico Freni will be discussed next week at the Mef table wanted by Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti to discuss the 2025 maneuver of about 25 billion euros. In addition to the TFR quota to be paid obligatorily, voluntary contributions by the individual worker or employer would still be possible. Not only that: the Minister of Labor and Social Policies, Marina Elvira Calderone, has also considered reopening “a semester of silent consent” in which it would be up to workers to communicate their decision regarding where to place their severance pay funds.
So, if the rule were to become law, what would happen? Every worker would see a sum withheld on their paycheck that would inevitably end up in a category pension fund or in one of those open to everyone on the market. Of course, there is no shortage of doubts. While on the one hand it is true that, by doing so, one would end up with a more substantial pension, on the other it is also true that workers would be forced not to use the sum accrued for the TFR for other purposes. It should be remembered, in fact, that the severance pay is a part of the salary that is called “deferred” because it is paid only at the end of the employment relationship. The amount is obviously not the same for everyone, since it is linked to the overall actual salary, usually placed at the top of the pay slip. Professor Alberto Brambilla, an expert in pension systems and president of the Itinerari previdenziali study and research center, speaking to La Verità argued that “it is not constitutional to force a worker to commit part of his salary to a pension fund. Joining supplementary pension provision can only be voluntary”.
To understand what a worker might find on his pay slip, let’s take an example. Let’s say a metalworker puts aside 100 euros of severance pay every month. If the Lega’s proposal were to be implemented, 75 euros would end up (as already happens today for those who have not joined the supplementary pension scheme) in the severance pay, the other 25 would go as a quota withheld for the pension fund, whether it be a category or open fund. Clearly, it is worth remembering, at the end of the employment relationship only the total amount set aside for the monthly severance pay quota would be paid, in other words everything that did not go into the pension fund. It should be noted, however, that the initiative proposed by the Lega is essentially aimed at private sector employees who keep their severance pay in the company. In the case of public sector workers, in fact, the sums in question are managed by INPS and it is not yet clear how the rule devised by the Lega could be implemented in this case.
What is certain is that, as a rule, relying on a supplementary pension fund over the course of a career always yields more than leaving the TFR in the company. According to data released monthly by Bff Banking Group, the first half of the year ended in a positive way for pension funds distributed in Italy, with negotiated funds appreciating 0.7% in June based on the general Bff-Ml index and open-end funds growing by 1% according to the general Bff index. Yields were driven upwards by equity sectors (+2.7% negotiated funds and +2.5% open-end funds) and balanced equity sectors (+1.6% ie +1.8%), while monetary pension funds (-0.3% and -0.1%) and bonds (-0.2% and -0.1%) slowed down.
The problem is that small and medium-sized Italian businesses, the majority of those present in the territory, prefer to keep the TFR in the company because those funds are used by the companies themselves to find materials or pay employees. “If today we look at the levels of membership in pension funds, we discover that large companies, those with over 100 employees, have very high membership rates, even higher than 80%, while companies with up to 49 employees have very low membership rates precisely because of the TFR,” Brambilla recalls. For this reason, it must be a government priority to dismantle this mechanism in order to turbocharge the supplementary pension. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of members of private pensions rose by 3.7%, on average with the last five years, but at a rate still too low to see a significant increase in the pension benefits of many Italians.
