Social Security will improve access to retirement for waiters or farm workers

The unions have convinced Social Security to improve access to retirement for discontinued permanent employees with periodic or intermittent activity, those professions such as hospitality or agriculture that, due to the nature of the activity of their professions, work seasonally. The Government has committed to recovering the partiality coefficient of 1.5 for these workers, so that each day quoted will count as one and a halfas applied to temporary workers, as reported by the UGT and CCOO unions.

The unions transferred this proposal to the Ministry of Social Security, arguing that some groups do not have activity all year round, but rather work intermittently or seasonally. The best example is that of hoteliers and tourist seasons; or day laborers in the agricultural sector who work during harvest seasons. And the biggest barrier is Minimum requirement of years of contributions to access the contributory retirement pension15 in total.

“The Government has understood that position, that demand that we have been insisting on and has committed to a reform of the General Social Security Law to recover that coefficient of 1.5. We still have to see the details of that regulation and the effects, but The Government has presented a proposal today, accepting it,” explains Carlos Bravo, confederal secretary of Public Policies and Social Protection of CCOO. In this way, the pensions department will correct the ‘legal vacuum’ in which these workers were left.

First approach for partial retirement

The Ministry’s negotiating team has submitted a first proposal on partial retirement with a replacement contract, a legal formula established in the industrial sector and especially in the automobile sector that allows the gradual exit from the labor market towards retirement while a younger worker prepares to fill the same position.

“There is some progress in early partial retirement, in which today the Ministry has given us a proposal for the first time. It is very far from our expectations, we consider that they cut rights. We have stated that it is a loss of opportunity to rejuvenate the workforce and give a flexible and slow exit from the labor market,” explained Cristina Estévez, secretary of Institutional Policy and Territorial Policies of UGT after the meeting. The center will prepare a document with its proposals for the next meeting.

However, it has been considered that This proposal is “very far” from union expectations and “cuts rights”, not only for the manufacturing industry, where it exists with a guaranteed replacement contract, but in other sectors. “It neither recovers the 2011 regulation, nor part of it for a different modification or adaptation. It has some interesting elements and others that directly reduce the rights of access to that regulation and generate penal elements that we do not share,” he stressed.

The table has also continued working on the development of what was agreed in the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC) in relation to the involvement of the mutual in the management and recovery of absences due to common illnesses that cause temporary disabilityas well as in the draft royal decree that will regulate access to coefficients that reduce the retirement age for toxic, dangerous, unhealthy or arduous jobs.

The unions have taken advantage of the meeting to also demand from the Ministry the order to regulate the contribution of non-labor internships, scholarships, people with contributions periods prior to this rule and that they have the right, through a special agreement, to be able to recover them for calculation.

“The Government has said that the exit was imminent, once again, but we have asked that the table, as this is a direct result of previous social dialogue agreements, has to know the text of the ministerial order and address it,” he explained. Bravo.

The parties have agreed to meet again on April 22 to continue negotiating the different matters on the table.