Whether or not to extend the calculation period to calculate the future pension and increase the maximum contribution bases continue to divide employers and unions | The centrals warn that the negotiations are advancing at an “extremely slow” pace to reach an agreement by December 31, as promised to the EU
The Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security has again quoted this Monday to patronal Y unions to advance in the pension reform negotiations. A negotiation that is heading towards its final stretch these next two weeks and on which there is still no agreement. Minister José Luís Escrivá has improved in his latest proposal the coverage of contribution gaps for people who have been without a worker for a few years of their professional career. A movement that benefits profiles with more intermittent trajectories and that enables them to have a better pension once they retire.
However, the core of the reform continues to divide the social agents and there is still no consensus on whether or not to extend the calculation period to calculate the future pension or how much the maximum contribution bases will rise in the coming decades. “The movement of the table is extremely slow”, they have warned from the unions, which makes it “difficult” to be able to meet the objective of the December 31 promised to Brussels.
Social Security has proposed increasing from the current 50% to 80% of the minimum base the coverage of contribution gaps between months 49 to 72 for those workers who leave their jobs to care for their sons. In other words, the State will put more money out of its pocket to compensate those men and women who at some point in the last 25 years before retiring were without work and did so after having a descendant. And it is that the pension makes the average of what was quoted in that period and those years that are blank significantly harm the final result of the calculation. With this movement, Escrivá improves the future benefits of those workers weighed down by their demographic contribution, according to Ministry sources.
At the expense of managing to weave the difficult balances to obtain the support of both employers and unions for its reform, Social Security tries to advance on other points. This is the case of the improvement in the treatment of contribution gaps. His first proposal already incorporated a generalized improvement of these, passing the minimum base provided by the State from 50% to 60%. Now it adds a ‘plus’ in the case of parents, which will mainly benefit mothers since they are the ones who most often give up their jobs to care for their children. According to a study by the Bank of Spain, women lose the 11.2% of their salary after having a child, parents only 0.15%.
“Clearly insufficient“This is how the CCOO negotiator has defined, Carlos Bravo, the content of the proposal verbalized this Monday by the Social Security. From the central they regret that the Government has not moved from its intention to extend from 25 to 30 years, with the possibility of discounting two, the computation period to calculate future benefits. They also demand to increase the maximum contribution bases beyond 30% in 25 years. And they regret that he has not yet put in black on white his intention to perpetuate the 0.6 point increase in social contributions -known as Intergenerational Equity Mechanism (MEI) until 2052. The headquarters have also regretted that the revaluation of non-contributory minimum pensions is not being discussed at the table, an issue that the Government reserves for 2023.