(Future Generations Network Appeal, September 10, 2026) An Appeal from the Future Generations Network, the Youth Organization Under the Pension Future Forum (Posted September 11, 2026)

(This is an appeal sent by

the youth organization under

the Pension Future Forum, the Future Generations Network,

to the National Assembly Health and Welfare Committee

— to the members of the National Assembly

who sit on it.

We hereby state that on the morning of September 10, 2026, this appeal was delivered

to the National Assembly Health and Welfare Committee

Chair Lee Man-hee

in person

by Yun Suk-myung,

a leader of the Pension Future Forum

and a Committee Member.

We hope that the voices of young people

will be reflected in the discussions

on the Basic Pension overhaul and the like,

which will shortly enter

full-scale review

of the bills.)

 To the Members of the National Assembly Health and Welfare Committee

An Appeal

 September 10, 2026

 The Youth Organization Under the Pension Future Forum

The Future Generations Network

Pension reform must be

not a "competition to give more"

but "a promise that can be kept."

The pension reform that we young people want is not a reform that pits older people and the young against each other.

It is a reform in which the state protects genuinely hard-pressed older people more generously, yet does not keep pushing that burden onto future generations.

We must start by rethinking the Basic Pension's criterion of "70% of older people."

Korea has already entered a super-aged society, and by 2050, 4 out of every 10 Koreans are projected to be 65 or older.

Even so, is it truly sustainable to keep in place a framework that pays the Basic Pension to roughly 70% of the population aged 65 and over?

Age in itself must not be the criterion for welfare.

For the Basic Pension, the pool of eligible recipients must be adjusted in stages on the basis of actual income, assets, and the risk of poverty,

and the savings must be used to provide more generous support to older people who are genuinely struggling to make ends meet.

The pension system as a whole must be linked together so that those in the middle class and above can prepare for their own old age through the National Pension, the retirement pension, and the like.

The same is true of the National Pension.

We must not think that reform is finished simply because the contribution rate has been raised and the income replacement rate adjusted.

We must continue with structural reform that raises sustainability in areas such as the contribution period, the eligibility age, fund management, and the automatic adjustment mechanism.

 The special occupational pension schemes, the Government Employees Pension among them, cannot be an exception either.

If they are structured so that future taxpayers must keep making up the shortfall, they must be examined alongside the National Pension and by the same standard.

Young people are not saying that the pension should be abolished.

What we are asking is that you build a pension that we can trust when we pay in and that is still there when we come to draw it.

If we do not reform now, the burden does not disappear; it is merely pushed back.

And the ones who will end up bearing that burden are today's young people and future generations.