Claris Ogangah
QUESTION: I am curious to know who the retirement age of 60 applies to as the company I work for retires people early. Their reasoning is that the 60 years only applies to civil servants and not to employees of private companies. Please clarify this issue.
The Employment Act does not have a provision for retirement age. However, it is provided for in the Pensions Act.
Section 9 provides that a public officer or a Government employee should retire any time after attaining the age of 50. However, the recognised retirement age, especially for civil and public servants, has always been 55 years.
Section 20 of the Pensions Act provides that the Act only applies to civil servants and all government employees and, therefore, ideally the retirement age should only be applicable to them.
But this age has been adopted by most companies and organisations and is the recognised retirement age.
Different companies, organisations and institutions have different provisions for retirement age and this is mainly provided for in the policy of the organisation or company.
This means a private company has the discretion to impose the age limit for its employees, which could be between 50 to 74 years, depending on your line of work.
Least qualified
Recently, the retirement age for civil and public servants was revised to 60 years. But this revision is only applicable to Government employees and those in private companies can only adopt it by changing their policy, if they so wish.
If your employer retires its employees earlier than the 60 years that the Government adopted, then it is clearly within its right to do so, as long as they are not retiring employees earlier than the 50 years provided by the Pensions Act.
At employment, one’s contract should include the provision on retirement age of the company.
Section 10 (3a) iii provides that the employment contract must contain the terms and conditions as regards pension and pension scheme. This means the retirement age must be specified as this is necessary information when registering with a pension scheme.
Your company must clearly have a provision on retirement age and it is important that all employees get to be informed of this age either through the employment contract or the company’s human resources policies. If the company has a position, then as an employee you have to comply and retire at the age recognised by the company because for now the directive to revise the retirement age is only applicable to civil servants.
The only exception is for persons with disability whose retirement age is 60 regardless of whether they are civil servants or employees in a private company.
