Muhammad Odeh, Assistant Director-General of the Social Security Corporation, revealed the most prominent features of the proposed amendments to the Social Security Law.

Odeh stressed that the proposal to raise the early retirement age will not include those who have completed 120 or more subscriptions, equivalent to actual subscriptions for ten years.

This came in a session organized by the Jordanian Labor Monitor of the Phenix Center for Economic Studies, in cooperation with the German Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, on the amendments to be made to the Social Security Law.

During the session, Odeh explained that raising the proposed retirement age will limit the coverage of all contributors, whose contributions are less than 120, with the 2019 amendments, as raising the early retirement age to 52 years for females and 55 years for males, but it was applied to those who subscribed to the guarantee starting from October The first of 2019.

He pointed out that the Corporation is studying linking the reduction of old-age contributions to economic growth, explaining that if the national economy experiences a contraction during two or three consecutive years, the guarantee will have the power to reduce old-age contributions, but the criteria for reduction are still under study.

It is also proposed to increase the period for the insured to benefit from unemployment insurance for those over 45 or 50 years to a full year instead of three months.

He stressed that the pension calculation that the new amendments will contain will not affect those who participated before 2022, knowing that it will include early retirees by adding the value of inflation to their salaries, at rates less than 1% that the obligatory retiree receives.

On the legislative stability of the Security Law, Odeh indicated that the Corporation is committed to conducting actuarial studies every 3 years, the results of which conclude that amendments should be made to the law itself, in order to achieve the purpose of the study.

The Phoenix Center had issued a position paper commenting on the announcement of the early retirement age adjustment, in which it stressed that the origin is the introduction of new social protections such as unemployment insurance and health insurance, as well as raising pension salaries because early retirees get it with the intention of going to another job with an additional wage to secure a decent life for their families.

The paper called for an amendment that introduces unemployment insurance instead of unemployment, so that male and female workers who are laid off before the obligatory retirement age can obtain cash incomes through which they can live in dignity.

In the paper, the Center called for providing social protections for retirees and the elderly that would provide them with a decent life, and reduce their dependence on the pension, before reconsidering the number of salaries that are included in the calculation of the pension.

The center called for an amendment to include new categories of workers in social security, which would increase the percentage of funds’ incomes, as workers not covered by the umbrella constitute about 48% of the total workforce in Jordan.

The Center believes that reducing the cost of the monthly subscription will attract hundreds of establishments to engage their workers, as many employers are burdened by a single subscription due to its high rate of 21.75%, of which 7.5% is deducted from the wages of the male or female worker.