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early-retirement benefits and pensions.
It is currently 66, with reduced
early-retirement benefits payable at age 62.
In Beckmann it held that early-retirement benefits paid on redundancy to those under the normal retirement age aren't old-age benefits under the exemption.
The ECJ indicated that pension benefits payable upon early retirement "agreed between the employer and employee" need not be distinguished from those triggered by redundancy, but did it really intend to include all early-retirement benefits as transferring under Tupe?
Government expenditure on old-age pensions (the state pension paid to those who have reached the statutory retirement age) exceeded all other kinds of pension expenditure, such as
early-retirement benefits and partial pensions.
For example, the tightening of the disability system in the Netherlands coincided with an increase in claimants of unemployment and other social welfare benefits, and this might be particularly relevant for older workers as they have benefits of long duration.(10) Also, the tightening of the disability system in Norway went hand in hand with an easing of entitlement conditions for special
early-retirement benefits, and substitution between the two schemes appears to have taken place.
In some cases such extension has defacto turned UI benefits into
early-retirement benefits, as search and work-availability requirements were often weakened as well.
The walkout comes after Lufthansa and the union failed to reach an agreement in a long-running row over
early-retirement benefits and pensions.
