Another pension reform is possible.

Since the failed Constitutional Review of 1993, Brazil has been experiencing an incomplete cycle of almost three decades of pension reforms. Throughout this process, organized workers and their representative entities have been committed not only to resisting privatization attempts against social security, but also to producing and disseminating new pension knowledge, built with technical rigor and political commitment. The challenge of thinking about "another reform" is once again on the trade union agenda of the Brazilian working class.

The current pension reform proposal by the Jair Bolsonaro government represents the biggest liberal offensive against the pension system since the establishment of the first Retirement and Pension Funds (CAPs) in the early 1920s. Its ultimate goal, with the creation of an individual capitalization system for new entrants to the labor market, is the compulsory transfer of pension resources from Brazilian workers to national and international financial capital.

In the 1990s, Brazil was the leading Latin American economy that did not pursue the path of total or partial privatization of its pension system. During this same period, 30 countries worldwide replaced their public pay-as-you-go systems with private funded systems. In Latin America, 14 countries adopted this model of structural pension reform. Almost thirty years later, in none of them have the promises of expanding pension coverage, increasing the value of benefits, and, above all, ensuring a dignified life in old age been fulfilled. On the contrary, the replacement of the public solidarity system with the individualistic private system has been accompanied by a profound process of social vulnerability and impoverishment of the elderly population.

Given the evident generational tragedy caused by the implementation of capitalization regimes, according to data from the International Labour Organization (ILO), by 2018, of the 30 countries that had privatized their pension systems, 18 had already reversed the privatization of their systems, either totally or partially, and returned to the public pay-as-you-go system.   

In Latin America, this was the case in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. And even in Chile, the leading example of the ultraliberal offensive against public solidarity-based social security, important initiatives were adopted to rescue the elderly from the misery promoted by private pension and retirement administrators.

Faced with the tragic Latin American lesson, Brazilian workers have three major challenges ahead: I) to reject entirely the current project to privatize social security; II) to articulate a large political and institutional mobilization movement to defeat Constitutional Amendment Proposal No. 6 (PEC 6/2019) in the National Congress; and III) to develop and present an alternative social security reform project to contest the hegemony of social policy in Brazil.

Of these three major challenges, the proposition that "Another Reform is Possible" may not be the most urgent, but it is certainly the greatest of all. Among other things, because it involves rescuing the concept that social security is an asset of and for workers. This also implies recognizing that important changes must be made to the current social security system to correct historical errors promoted by an excessively isolated technocratic bias, alien to the interests of the workers themselves.  

On the other hand, in favor of the thesis that "Another Reform is Possible," we have the knowledge produced about the Brazilian social security system by important associations of public servants and unions of private sector workers. Technical and class-based entities such as the Inter-Union Department of Parliamentary Advisory (Diap) and the Inter-Union Department of Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (Dieese), among others, have produced new social security knowledge of extreme importance for workers.

In the purest welcoming and transformative spirit of the "Ecology of Knowledge," Brazilian universities must open their campuses to the joint construction of a public, solidarity-based, and emancipatory alternative to social security with organized workers and their representative entities. Initiatives like this are already being undertaken in various institutions (public and private) throughout the country. It is time to build a new social security agenda: "Another Reform is Possible."