The information event, organized in Cieza by the Podemos Seniors' Circle, attracted a large audience.
Last Thursday, October 8th, an interesting talk-discussion entitled "Women and Pensions: Present and Future" was held at the Padre Salmerón Library in Cieza. This informative event, which began at 7:30 p.m. and continued until the library closed, drew a large audience, including many retired residents of the municipality.
The event was organized by the Podemos-Murcia Region Seniors' Circle, part of the Regional Pensioners' Coordinator, in collaboration with the Podemos Circle of Cieza. It was presented by José Eduardo Illueca, a resident of Cieza. Three speakers were present: María Marín, representing Podemos-Murcia Region, and Pedro Martínez Díaz and Miguel Campillo, representing the pensioners.
The first guest to speak was Pedro Martínez Díaz, a retired lawyer, who reviewed the history of the public pension system from its origins in 19th-century Germany to the present day, placing particular emphasis on comparing the models currently in place in major Western European countries. A discussion, incidentally, that leaves the current system in Spain in a bad light, one of the least protective and guaranteeing of the elderly from this comparative perspective.
María Marín was tasked with introducing the gender perspective into the pensions debate, and in her intervention, she highlighted the significant inequalities that persist between men and women in today's society. These inequalities are particularly visible in the workplace, where the "pay gap" is an objective and undeniable reality, maintained through various mechanisms that perpetuate this injustice. This situation is compounded and reaches truly dramatic levels when we look at elderly women, who receive an average pension far below that of men in the same generational stratum, despite the fact that, in many cases, they were also women who worked throughout their lives, both in the home and outside of it. María Marín also pointed out how this "retirement gap" is asymmetrical from a territorial perspective, with the Region of Murcia being one of the regions in Spain where the situation is most serious, as a result of its slow modernization.
The closing keynote was veteran unionist Miguel Campillo, one of the founders of the Workers' Commissions in the Region of Murcia and now fully committed to the pensioners' demands. Miguel vehemently insisted on the need to organize for these demands and pointed out how Podemos is the only party with a chance of governing that unequivocally defends the protection of public pensions, the elimination of the sustainability factor, and the statutory revaluation of their amounts in line with the CPI.
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