Keywords
Summary

Keywords

1 Social policy - Men and women - Substantive scope of Directive 79/7 - Early retirement benefits granted on entry into early retirement - Included - Worker's entry into early retirement by reason of the declared state of critical difficulty of the employer undertaking - Not relevant

(Council Directive 79/7, Art. 3(1))

2 Social policy - Equal treatment for men and women in matters of social security - Directive 79/7 - Derogation permitted with regard to the consequences that may result, for other benefits, from the existence of different pensionable ages - Scope - Limitation solely to discrimination necessarily and objectively linked to the difference in pensionable ages - Discrimination with regard to the granting of credit for supplemental retirement contributions in the event of entry into early retirement - Permissible

(Council Directive 79/7, Art. 7(1)(a))

Summary

3 Early-retirement benefits resulting from entry into early retirement are directly and effectively linked to protection against the risk of old age, as referred to in Article 3(1) of Directive 79/7, and therefore come within the scope of that directive. The mere fact that early retirement is the direct result of the critical situation facing the undertaking within which the worker in question was last employed cannot be regarded as meaning that such benefits are equivalent to benefits linked to dismissal, since they are directly governed by national legislation and are compulsory for certain general categories of workers.

4 Where, pursuant to Article 7(1)(a) of Directive 79/7 on the progressive implementation of the principle of equal treatment for men and women in matters of social security, a Member State has set pensionable ages which differ according to sex, that provision also allows it to provide that employees of an undertaking declared to be in critical difficulty may be credited with a maximum of five years' supplemental retirement contributions starting from their entry into early retirement until the date on which they reach the age at which they are entitled to a retirement pension, that is to say 55 years in the case of women and 60 years in the case of men, since the difference relating to sex in the method of calculating early-retirement benefits is objectively and necessarily linked to the setting of pensionable ages which differ for men and women.

That discrimination, being objectively linked to the setting of pensionable ages which differ for men and women, within an early-retirement scheme which avoids penalizing the worker who ceases working before reaching the statutory pensionable age, by ensuring that that worker will benefit from notional contributions in respect of the period by which he falls short of reaching that statutory pensionable age, is a feature of the linkage between the retirement-pensions scheme and the early-retirement scheme in question and is necessary in order to preserve that linkage, since its removal might give rise to other forms of discrimination.