The Government is studying how to encourage more retirees to continue working and collect pension and salary

He Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations negotiates with employers and unions to expand incentives so that a retired can voluntarily decide to continue working beyond the legal retirement age and combine their pension with a salary (or part of it) in the meantime. A reform that seeks to reduce costs for the public coffers (through more contributions from those active retirees) and that would benefit to a greater extent highly qualified professionals who, due to the circumstances of their activity, can afford to extend their working career. That is, it would be more designed for a doctor than for a construction worker.

In parallel with extending the careers of these professionals with jobs that are less demanding on the body, the department directed by Elma Saiz It also contemplates reducing the legal retirement age in the case of those most dangerous or painful professions or trades. Here the conditions are still not clear and there is some concern among the unions that retirement be facilitated for those dangerous jobs (where men predominate), but not so much in the case of painful or exhausting ones (where women predominate).

This has been the bulk of the conversations held between the Secretary of State for Social Security, Borja Suarezand the representatives of CEOE, CCOO and UGT in a meeting held this Monday and which lasted for about four hours. In it, the unions have proposed to the Government to introduce a higher contribution for companies that have workers on staff. discontinuous fixedgiven its increase since the entry into force of the labour reform. Sources from the employers’ association define the appointment as a “making contact” and the parties have agreed to meet again and cross roles starting in the last week of January.

The foundations of the latest pension reform, which seeks to give sustainability to the public system before the progressive demographic aging, are based on the idea that working people take longer to retire and permanently leave the labor market. During the last legislature, measures were approved that penalized early and voluntary retirement and in the present, the Executive seeks to deepen this line through new regulatory modifications.

Sources present in the negotiation affirm that Social Security has not submitted a specific proposal on what incentives it contemplates so that more retirees do not definitively disconnect from the labor market. One of these is to increase the assumptions in which a person can continue working once they have reached the legal age retirement and has begun to collect his public benefit. Thus, the professional continues to contribute to Social Security, reducing the total cost for the public treasury.

Currently one of the formats that allow salary and pension to be made compatible is the so-called “active retirement“. This allows a retiree to collect between 50 and 100% of their pension, while at the same time earning a salary or income from an activity as a self-employed worker. In the case of salaried workers, they can receive half of their pension.And in the case of self-employed workers, they can reach up to 100% of the public benefit if they have hired at least one worker.

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At this Monday’s meeting the parties also addressed “the review of the procedure for the coefficients reducing the retirement age in arduous or dangerous activities” to incorporate “objective indicators for its determination”, as made public by the Ministry in a statement after the meeting. That is, the Government and social agents want to agree on a series of indicators that allow certain workers to retire before the legal age retirement – today set at 66.6 months – without implying a cut in their future pension.

Social Security and social agents also intend to review the involvement of mutual collaborators in the leave processes due to temporary disability, specifically in cases of workers recovering from trauma injuries. The general idea they work on is that an employee, if he voluntarily accepts it, can be treated by the medical services of a mutual insurance company in order to receive care sooner, recover sooner and be able to return to work sooner.

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