April the 10th, 2022 - A concerning amount of Croatian retirees have decided to take up work despite drawing their pensions owing to continue financial difficulties and a frequent struggle to make ends meet.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, research for the development of a socially innovative programme to encourage and support Croatian retirees shows that as many as 74 percent of those drawing their pensions who participated in reactivation in the domestic labour market stated financial issues as a reason for them returning to work, as was reported by the portal Mirovina/Pension. This is the information that the Ombudsman Tena Simonovic Einwalter warned about in her annual Report for 2021.
According to the latest available data for the month of February, 19,692 part-time workers in Croatia were retirees, which would mean that more than 14,500 retired employees work because they don't have enough money to live on, or because they have to.
In addition to the fact that pensions are insufficient for most people, many Croatin retirees continue to go to work because they haven't yet repaid some kind of loan or settled some other outstanding financial obligations, such as debts for utilities, foreclosures and the like.
Therefore, although perceived as a benefit, the reactivation of Croatian retirees on the labour market is often the result of their poor financial situation and pensions from which they simply cannot live, the aforementioned ombudswoman warned.
According to the survey, Croatian retirees were most often employed as salespeople (51 percent) and bus drivers (22 percent), followed by chefs and assistant cooks, telephone interviewers, transfer drivers, valet and facade makers.
“Croatian retirees have access to mostly low-paid jobs that require a lower level of education. This is a consequence of the fact that some groups are legally barred from continuing to work in their professions, such as school staff,'' Einwalter said in her report.
The labour market isn't particularly favourable when it comes to hiring Croatian retirees, and one of the biggest difficulties in finding a job in the survey is the existence of prejudices among employers about retirees as a homogeneous group without much potential.
For more, check out our lifestyle section.
