Panama Lawyers Warn that Excluding Retirees from Employment Would Be Unconstitutional.

Lawyers and former union leaders rejected initiatives that seek to make retirement an automatic cause for removing a person from their job, considering that they violate the Constitution and waste the experience accumulated in the public sector.  Lawyer and former president of the National Bar Association, Juan Carlos Araúz, argued that establishing mandatory retirement solely based on age or age “would be a mechanism of labor exclusion.” He explained that retirement is an acquired right and should not be transformed into a sanction or a presumption of incapacity. “Acquiring the right to a pension is one thing, but losing the capacity or the right to continue working is quite another,” he stated.

Araúz recalled the Supreme Court ruling of December 6, 2019, which declared that retirement does not constitute an incompatibility with continuing to work. He added that any renewal policy should be based on performance, suitability, and evaluations, not on age.  For his part, lawyer Felipe Cabeza called the exclusion of retirees a “mistake,” arguing that “the accumulated wisdom of years of work would be lost” and warned that it would be unconstitutional. He pointed out that 99.9% of public servants do not retire because their pensions do not cover expenses such as food, medicine, and other necessities. Cabeza proposed, as a “dignified solution,” allowing those who complete many years of service to retire with 100% of their salary and revising the Constitution to establish a conditional working cap.

In 2005, the Supreme Court declared the last paragraph of the well-known Faúndes Law unconstitutional, due to discrimination.  The Constitution protects the right to work and the principle of equality and non-discrimination.  Law 18 of 2008 eliminated mandatory retirement at age 75.  Law 40 of August 20, 2007, repealed the regulations that required public servants to retire from their positions upon reaching the age of 75, a provision popularly known as the “Faúndes Law,” enacted in 1998. Article 2 of the law states that “no state institution may require the resignation of a public servant as a prerequisite for receiving retirement or an old-age pension, nor may it require it after the employee has already received that benefit.” As background, the Supreme Court of Justice issued rulings of partial unconstitutionality, such as the one issued in 2005, accompanied by reforms approved during the 2000s that sought to exempt certain sectors, such as university professors and diplomats, from this restriction.