The Government wants to reach more workers with early retirement due to danger

The Government is preparing, together with employers and unions, a reform of early retirement for particularly arduous, toxic, dangerous or unhealthy jobs. The draft that prepares the regulatory change lays the foundations to expand early retirement for reasons of danger: those in which the deterioration of physical abilities, such as agility or eyesight, become a risk for the worker himself and for others. A example that Cristina Estévez, UGT negotiator, conveys is that of a professional driver with impaired vision and reflexes. However, unions are still looking for a formula to find objective indicators that justify an improvement in the retirement of workers in activities considered “painful.”

There are eight professional groups that can retire early: Miners’ Statute, flight personnel of aerial workers, railway workers, bullfighting workers, artists, firefighters, and police forces. Eirtzaintza and the Local Police. The coefficients for early withdrawal are applied in consideration of activities that do not have substitute work and the applicant cannot be relocated. This indicator establishes the years that the worker can advance his retirement, without seeing his benefit penalized and will be updated after ten years.

Social Security proposes several formulas to expand this spectrum of workers who can access early retirement. The first method, calculating the total expenditure on sick leave for a given age and gender group based on the sum of social contributions paid. The second formula would relate sick leave to the total number of workers at risk. The third would measure mortality over the total number of workers in that activity (multiplied by a thousand).

Previously, the accident rate, hardship, danger or toxicity of the work by sector will be evaluated based on studies to be prepared by a team made up of the Ministry, social agents and the Labor Inspection. It is at this point where the unions want to convince the Government on how to measure “hardness.”

Furthermore, the joint proposal of UGT and CCOO is committed to giving greater consideration to the professions with a greater female presence and relating it to the age factor immediately, and not after a year of evaluation as the Government proposes.

In any case, members of the social dialogue assume that the cost is zero for Social Security. Workers in the aforementioned regimes already pay an additional contribution during the period occupied in the arduous or dangerous activity.

Minority unions

Some minority unions are pushing to gain influence on early retirement. The spokesperson for the legal department of the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), Silvia G. Arribas, points out that “the consequences of previous activities are not taken into account.” From UGT they point out that the alternative, if the illness can be demonstrated, is disability retirement.

With current regulations, a worker can prove previous stages in particularly arduous occupations that justify early retirement without loss of pension, as long as the worker is registered 12 months prior to the request. From the social dialogue they confirm that this requirement remains unchanged in the draft presented.

The draft limits the request and participation in the procedure to those most representative unions at the state and regional level, while legal experts refer to two Supreme Court rulings, from 2012 and 2023, that annul the expression ‘most representative’. “According to the Constitutional Court, the promotion of workers’ interests corresponds, without distinction, to all unions,” they explain from CGT.