(The Public Pension Strengthening People’s Action

appears confident that it can prove

the content of its own

‘press clarification,’ released on April 5, 2024,

to be true.

We ask the Public Pension Strengthening People’s Action,

if only to prove

that its claims are true,

to accept, even now, on the precondition that it be streamed live on YouTube,

the live debate

that the Pension Future Forum is calling for.

This is because, since as early as April 2024, the Pension Future Forum

has proposed on several occasions

that the Public Pension Strengthening People’s Action

name a time and a place for a debate,

as the Forum stands ready to debate

in order to establish

the truth

of the claims

that organization has been making.)

[Press Clarification by the Public Pension Strengthening People’s Action]

"On the Pension Future Forum’s Claim That the Deliberation Results

of the Agenda Deliberation Panel Amount to Collusion (2024. 4. 5.)"

On April 3,

the Pension Future Forum held a press conference

at which it said of the Public Deliberation Committee of the National Assembly Special Committee on Pension Reform that

“there are doubts as to whether the agenda deliberation panel’s process of selecting agenda items

was fair.” 

According to press reports, they

claimed that “the Pension Public Deliberation Committee

was composed mainly of scholars

who have argued for strengthening income security,”

that, of the options before the first Private Advisory Committee of the Special Committee on Pension Reform,

“the option preferred by many pension experts was excluded during the agenda deliberation panel’s discussions,”

and that “the arena for setting the agenda is a tilted playing field.” 

However, the claim that the Pension Public Deliberation Committee

was composed mainly of income-security advocates is not true.

In the agenda deliberation panel’s agenda-selection process, experts holding the income-security position and experts holding the fiscal-focused position both took part, and each side was given an equal opportunity to present its position.

Considering how the various government committees have been run since the launch of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, it is absurd in itself for advocates of fiscal stabilization to talk about a tilted playing field.

On various statutory committees, including the National Pension Fund Management Committee, the representation of the insured has been systematically excluded, and the Financial Estimation Committee, too, was so biased in its membership and so one-sided in its operation that in the end two private-sector members resigned. 

The Pension Future Forum

is known to be a group of pension researchers, journalists, and others, including Lee Geun-myeon, a former Samsung man who served as Minister of Personnel Management under the Park Geun-hye administration, and Yun Suk-myung, former President of the Korean Pension Association.

It is difficult for us to judge what representativeness and expertise the Pension Future Forum, in which some researchers and journalists biased toward fiscal stabilization take part, actually has.

However, we ask that the ‘arrogance of experts,’ which treats as ‘collusion’ or ‘ignorance’ the decisions reached by people who took part as representatives of their respective interest groups and as individual citizens, who listened to diverse opinions and went through a process of deliberation and coordination, now come to an end.

We also urge the media, which report these people’s opinions as they are without even minimal fact-checking, to strive for more balanced and careful reporting.

April 5, 2024
The Public Pension Strengthening People’s Action
(www.pensionforall.kr)

http://pensionforall.kr/2024/04/05/2293/