The new text of the draft Base Law that the Executive Branch sent to Congress, and which already has an opinion to be discussed (and voted on) this Monday, constitutes a new attack on women’s rights by the government of Javier Milei. This time, it is against the possibility of retiring at 60 years of age.
The modification proposed through the bill consists of the elimination of the pension moratorium (75% of those who access it are women), the creation of a Proportional Retirement Benefit, intended for people who turned 65 years of age and did not complete 30 years of contributions necessary to retire, who would access a Universal Senior Citizen Benefit after that age.
In this way, Javier Milei takes another step in widening the gender gap that in recent years he has worked intensely to reduce. According to the report issued by ACIJ and ELA in March, ANSES reported that 6 out of 10 women who are retired did so through the moratorium.
These are women who dedicated a large part of their lives to unpaid care work or worked in the informal sector. Also private home workers who in recent years had been able to register their contributions through the Registered Program that was eliminated by DNU 70/2023.
“The elimination of the moratorium means that 9 out of 10 women will go to the PUAM, which applies from the age of 65, does not accumulate with a pension and is 20 percent less than the minimum retirement,” explained deputy Myriam Bregman through her social networks.
Economist Mercedes D’Alessandro (former director of the gender area that does not exist today in the Ministry of Economy) also raised this question in her X account.
«In our country, women perform 75% of care tasks. That is why they have lower rates of activity, formality, lower salaries and higher levels of unemployment. They work twice as hard, but their work doesn’t count. And they can rarely contribute. Inequalities in the labor market mean that only 11% of women between 55 and 59 years old have more than 20 years of contributions. That is, only 1 in 10 women close to retirement are in a position to do so. Motherhood penalizes women when it comes to working. The more children they have, the less social security contributions they accumulate. That is why most of the people who were able to retire with the moratoriums are women. The moratoriums allow you to pay the pension debt, complete the contributions that could not be made for all these reasons (and more) and retire. The data is part of the systematizations carried out during the past management.
For her part, the economist Lucía Cirmi expressed. «In the Bases Law they cut the pension moratorium in the name of the ‘unsustainability’ of the system, but I can’t think of anything more unsustainable than leaving older people earning $152,000 per month (PUAM) and women who today have between 60 and 65 years without anything.
Also the leader of the Ni Una Menos organization, Luci Cavallero, referred to the intention to eliminate the pension moratorium. “We feminists have been denouncing it on the streets since 2018. We already know that the debt is paid with our unpaid work,” she said.
The organization Ni Una Menos, which has been working intensively on complaints against the setbacks in women’s rights and diversities proposed by this government, also denounced the reforms proposed by the Base Law.
