In Spain, we live under a constant bombardment of messages that single out the public pension system as the great enemy of the young. According to this narrative, we need to reform pensions and cut pensioners’ purchasing power to give young people some relief. It’s a mistaken diagnosis and, I’d venture to say, a tendentious one: taken to its conclusion, it threatens to dismantle the welfare state and widen inequalities without benefiting any young person — mortgaging their future instead. My proposal is the opposite: to harness the collective power that pensions represent and steer it toward the real needs of the population, rather than fueling an intergenerational conflict.

It’s worth remembering where pensions come from. A state system can pursue three aims: a welfarist approach that only seeks to stave off poverty among the elderly; an insurance model based on individual or collective savings; and a universal, redistributive system grounded in labour-market participation, with rights acquired vis-à-vis the State. This last model is the one that took hold across much of Europe after the Second World War, driven by the strength of the labour movement. Spain, however, had to wait for the dictator’s death to have it. Today, after a minimum number of years of contributions, the State recognizes the right to a pension, with a floor and a ceiling designed to limit market inequalities. The reality is that here we don’t have a problem of “rich” pensioners: nearly a quarter of retirees are poor, and the system still does a poor job of protecting those who haven’t had a continuous working career. While it’s true that Spain guarantees a relatively high wage replacement rate for middle incomes compared with other countries, this needn’t be a bad thing if the spending that pensioners do goes toward the collective good and not toward feeding inequalities.

The supposed conflict between young people and pensions rests on two ideas. The first: lowering contributions to put more money in workers’ pockets. But it’s worth asking who holds the bargaining power. Today, around 85% of contributions are paid by the employer. To believe that a cut would be passed on to wages in full, with unions as weakened as they are, is naive or downright deceitful. For the employer, it makes no difference to pay now or in deferred form; for the worker, it’s an extremely risky bet. And if young workers receive that wage in the present rather than deferred, they’ll have to invest it on their own if they want to keep an income in old age. What the public system does is guarantee that security collectively, de-commodified and shielded from financial swings, with no intermediaries (which is why the banks are so against it). For decades, the pension system ran a surplus, and we might ask what was done with that money and what it was invested in. For instance, we might ask why the public housing that has been built has ended up on the private market and how to reverse that, or why Catalonia has so few public companies in strategic sectors.

The second idea is to cut pension spending outright to free up money for the young. While there can always be a debate about needs, this view forgets the macroeconomic role of pensions compared with other, more regressive programmes. Pensions are a macroeconomic stabilizer of the first order: the money goes into spending, it guarantees consumption, it sustains the local business fabric and the jobs that young people hold. Allowing older people to retire with peace of mind also favours the entry of new people and innovation. What’s more, in a country with so much precarity, the pension is often what supports an entire family. Any reform, then, must take into account differences of class and gender: raising the retirement age or tying it to life expectancy penalizes precisely those who do the hardest jobs and live fewer years. And while pension spending hovers around 13% of GDP in Spain, 42% comes back in the form of taxes. There can be a debate about contributions on the highest salaries or about maximum pensions, but an across-the-board cut to pensions — especially given the high levels of poverty in old age and the lack of public investment in care services — is a failed programme from the outset. In any case, whatever gains might be made from a greater contribution by those who draw the largest pensions should go toward lifting pensioners out of poverty or toward building public care services.

In the pensions debate, we need a shift in narrative, one that moves beyond the zero-sum game. We need to strengthen the collective power of the public pension system instead of talking about how those who have worked their whole lives now have to take a cut to their purchasing power. In my view, the opportunity to seize is to build an awareness within the working class (which includes pensioners) of how to channel pension spending and savings toward greater economic sovereignty and the ecological transition. The idea may sound a bit “geeky,” but older people are in fact among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate, as well as to cuts in welfare systems, and they would be the first to benefit from nurturing safer ecological and economic systems.

Some proposals would be to offer pensioners with greater purchasing power investment vehicles in sovereign funds directed toward collective goods, such as public or cooperative housing programmes for the old and the young alike. Unlike private pension systems, which advance the financialization of the economy while giving workers little effective control over productive processes, feeding sovereign funds with public pensions would be aimed at covering the population’s basic needs. We could also imagine pensions paid partly in local currency to boost neighbourhood commerce and generate virtuous circuits in the districts. Or even enabling union mechanisms to reinvest pensions in the productive fabric under workers’ control.

In short, my proposal is that, rather than entering into the zero-sum game, we rethink the social function of this public tool. When we talk about the problems facing the young, let’s value pensions for what they are: an ally to work with.