Retirement preparation plans and implementation of the rights of the elderly in Brazil: Dialogs on the paradoxes of the non-working retiree

In the contemporary societies the importance and exaltation still given to labor assure the role of the “worker” a prominent place among the social roles representatives of the self, and conditioning the cognitive, affective and axiological aspects of the historical subject. The changeover to non-working condition, usually followed by natural changes regarding the process of ageing, represents a moment of loss of social-professional identity, incurring processes of subjective emptying and expropriation of autonomy. Such phenomena worsens before social dynamics of old age denial, which see the elderly as “the obsolete”, “the undesirable”, “that which you can no longer use”, particularly, in east countries of late industrialization which have not lived the reality of the Welfare State, such as Brazil. For these and other factors, the time of retirement is characterized by tension and distress, by change of identity and paradigms which, normally, also come along with changes in one’s perception of oneself (self-esteem and self-image). In this context, the Retirement Preparation Programs (PPA) becomes more important, whether for the informative/formative need to deal with gains and losses resulting from the process of breaking with the work, or because we are experiencing the phenomena of increasing life expectancy and quality of Brazilian elderly people. For legal reasons (Article 28 of Act 10.741/2003), PPA’s shall be adopted as public policies for the implementation of the rights of the elderly having as action guidelines the active concepts of ageing and retirement which defend the optimization of opportunities of health, participation, safety, and professional and personal success of elderly people. Based on three core pillars – the psychological, the financial, and of future activities – PPA’s try to humanize the changeover to non-working, seeing the man as a complex, social and cultural being who may not be reduced to the condition of homo economicus.