In the 1940s he arrived in the Basque Country, being a child, to work. He worked in hard industrial jobs, many colleagues suffered from occupational diseases, others died at work. Adolfo is 92 years old. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) believes that it is living in excess, as it has been collecting the pension for too many years and also believes that this great life expectancy is a "financial risk". Madalena has spent her whole life working on cleaning her houses. He didn't quote, but that wasn't in his hands. He worked in the houses of the bourgeoisie of Neguri. She receives a non-contributory pension of EUR 392, even though she has worked her whole life, both at home and away from home. Maria is almost 40 years old. It obtains precarious employment contracts, most of which are not full-time, if a salary reaches EUR 1,000 it is a miracle. Despite having worked since the age of 20, he has only paid eight years. These are some of the common realities in our environment.

In this “Basque oasis”, the tendency of wages is worrying if the elements that make up it are kept in caeteris paribus. In the last nine years, in Gipuzkoa, the territory with the highest wages in the Kingdom of Spain, the average wage has only increased by 1.9%, the purchasing power has fallen ten points, there is still a large gender wage gap and the working conditions of workers under 40 years of age continue to deteriorate. In recent decades, in this endless economic transformation, the services sector is the base (spoiler: together with the industry, it brings worse working conditions). It is clear that the pressure on the public pension systems that are now in place is going to increase.

Lobbys, technocrats and economists based on pseudoscience of financial institutions have been fighting for years against a public and dignified pension system. A few years ago, “productivity” (from work?) it was mentioned as the central element of the transformation of the system. Today, instead, it's a demography. However, in the case of the Kingdom of Spain, the Foundation for Compulsory Economic Studies (FEDEA) has made it clear in a report that what calls into question the system is not that there are more and more elderly people, but that there is a fall in wages. And of course, lobbys, technocrats and right-wing economists can say nothing against this empirical evidence, even if they use simplistic explanations to confuse people or dress up with mathematical formulas.

In the French Republic, the current pension system is the direct result of the labour struggle, which gained great strength in the 1930s and beyond: The Conseil National de la Résistance supported this requirement in its programme. In the Kingdom of Spain, labor struggles during Franco also got the approval of the Social Security Law. Public pension systems were not accepted by lobbys, technocrats and economists of derechas.La question that we should ask ourselves is not whether the
X system is economically sustainable, as it is not correct, because the other factor of the formula keeps it secret caeteris paribus. The question is, as a society, how we want to organize the retirement of our seniors and our future. This will require us to break down certain conceptual limits of the local capitalist model to define how we want to share wealth. The future has to be decided by society, not by the powerful, and this is not an easy struggle. After all, we are talking about the political economy.