The government intends to gradually raise the retirement age of national civil servants to 65 from the current 60, and will submit bills to next year's ordinary Diet session for that purpose, The Yomiuri Shimbun has learned.
The bills are meant to revise the National Public Service Law and other legislation so that the policy will go into effect in fiscal 2022, extending the mandatory retirement age by one year once every two or three years, according to sources.
Currently, the mandatory retirement age of national civil servants is set at 60 except for vice ministers and some other posts. The envisioned bills will introduce a system in which employees retire from managerial posts -- such as directors general -- when they reach 60 and instead take up non-managerial posts, for example, as specialized personnel or assistants to directors.
However, some will be allowed to keep their managerial posts depending on their specialties and careers.
The new framework will ensure a wider range of work styles for national public servants, allowing them to choose shorter work hours for such reasons as the need to provide nursing care for family members.
The bills likely will call for setting the pay for government employees aged over 60 at about 70 percent of the amount they earned until that age, in keeping with a general trend among private-sector companies, according to the sources.
Public servants can currently continue to work even after they turn 60 under the reemployment system. In this framework, however, such employees have to officially quit before being reemployed as part-timers, and the government faces an increasing number of such workers.
A senior official at the Cabinet Bureau of Personnel Affairs said the current reemployment system "does not fully take advantage of the skills and careers of [over-60] employees."
In August 2018, the National Personnel Authority submitted a report to the Cabinet calling for the retirement age of national civil servants to be extended. However, implementing the proposed measure had been put off because of concerns that this would cause the employment costs for national civil servants to balloon.
"This aspect would make it difficult to earn the understanding of the public," said a senior member of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
The government, which has been studying reforms of the welfare system for all generations, plans to submit a bill to the next ordinary Diet session to revise the Law on Stabilization of Employment of Elderly Persons to call for companies to make efforts to ensure job opportunities until the age of 70.
The government has concluded that it is also necessary to adopt this move for its own employees.
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