45岁就退休？

45岁就退休？

中国一些问题严重的省份正在实行提前退休制度，以减少国有部门的劳动者数量。“裁员成为企业、政府和工人之间的长期战斗。内部退休只是意味着把问题踢到未来去解决。”研究员基根·埃尔默表示。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

payroll工资单；在册职工人数['peɪrəʊl]

mining capacity采矿能力；生产能力

demonstration证明；示威游行[demən'streɪʃ(ə)n]

compensation报酬；赔偿金[kɒmpen'seɪʃ(ə)n]

rust belt铁锈地带（铁锈地带指从前工业繁盛今已衰落的发达国家一些地区）

China plans early retirements to trim bloated state payrolls（ 523 words）

By Christian Shepherd in Shanghai and Lucy Hornby in Beijing

Hard-hit Chinese provinces are instituting early retirement to push workers off state sector employment rolls,generating a spate of small protests and further straining local economies in the nation’s rust belt.

The move is designed to help capacity cuts in bloated state-run heavy industry companies. It also marks a return to policies from the 1990s,when an estimated 30m workers were dropped from state payrolls and offered subsidies in a practice known as“internal retirement”,which avoided an increase in official unemployment numbers.

At least seven provinces have drawn up plans for workers to take early retirement,Chinese media reported this month. The plans are viewed as a way to comply with Beijing’s directives this year to reduce excess steel and mining capacity without the plant shutdowns that could lead to street protests.

“That they are encouraging it now suggests it has gone or is going well and is avoiding unrest,”said Keegan Elmer,researcher for China Labour Bulletin,which tracks workers’issues.

Nevertheless,an increase in protests in October followed a series of large demonstrations early in 2016 when steel and coal capacity cuts were first announced. Most were relatively small involving dozens of affected workers holding signs rather than the mass street marches that authorities fear.

Workers who were laid off or retired early in the 1990s often resurface to protest in provincial capitals or Beijing,usually because compensation has dried up. Many found informal jobs in the intervening years,but are now growing older without adequate state-backed insurance or pensions.

“Staff cutbacks become a long-term battle between the companies,governments and the workers. Internal retirement just means kicking the can further down the road. There has been lots of steelworker activism that has gone on for decades,”said Mr Elmer.“All these old sores can easily be brought back to the surface.”

China’s official retirement age is 60 for men. For female civil servants it is 55,for female workers,50. Early retirement brings that forward by five years,leaving female employees in depressed cities vulnerable to losing their jobs in their mid-40s when they still have dependants at home. Former employees get a stipend but must wait until formal retirement age to claim their pensions.

In February,labour and human resources minister Yin Weimin encouraged voluntary early retirement as one solution for the struggling steel and coal sectors,and the government said it would allocate Rmb100bn（$14.6bn) to retraining or relocating about 1.8m laid-off workers. Since then the top planning agency has put out a number of notices discouraging early retirement,indicating that there may be disagreement among bureaucracies about the merits of the practice.

One of the concerns is the rickety state of local pension funds,particularly in industrial areas that are also the centre for the slowdown.

“When you look at how [internal retirement] is put into practice,you realise that in the Chinese situation where the development of workers’organisations is weak and state-owned enterprises are overly powerful,it’s very easy for workers to become the biggest losers,”Liu Dapeng,a law professor at Wuhan University,wrote on a social media blog post.