Firefighters, railway workers, flight personnel and local police are some of the eight groups to which a differentiated early retirement regime is currently applied as they are considered risky activities. They may retire earlier than the rest of the workers due to the characteristics of their profession. Well, now the list of occupations, categories or professional activities that can be retired early will be expanded when it is considered that these jobs are of an exceptionally painful, toxic, dangerous or unhealthy nature. How will these activities be determined? Well, depending on their morbidity or mortality rates.
This is the proposal that the Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security has presented this week to social agents to establish the so-called reducing coefficients that will regulate this anticipation of the retirement age. From the outset, a limit. In no case can you access the pension under 52 years of age. And then, three indices to identify the occupations to which it will be applied. One of the indices is based on the total sick leave benefits divided by the sum of the contribution bases; a second calculates the total number of casualties divided by the number of workers exposed to risk; and the third divides the number of deaths also by the number of workers.
These are the criteria to determine the jobs affected based on their morbidity or mortality, but it is also planned to address the case of activities in specific sectors where the rate of illness or death is not high, but in which the physical or psychological requirements to carry out work from a certain age entails hardship. In these cases, a working group will be created, with representatives from different ministries, unions and employers' associations to study their possible inclusion.
An element to add is that, to maintain the sustainability of the system, the extra expense that the early retirement of these workers will entail will be offset by an increase in their Social Security contribution. This increase will take the form of “a type of additional contribution that will be borne by the company and the worker or solely by the worker in the case of self-employed workers,” says the draft decree law presented to the social agents to which La Vanguardia had access. It is an extra contribution that will be established each year in the General State Budgets.
“It is a proposal to continue negotiating” the unions indicate and point out that “an improvement in the indices proposed will be necessary, some are superfluous and others are missing.” They also add that the definition of penalties due to physical or psychological requirements linked to age must be improved.
One of the points still open is what activities will be able to benefit from this regime. What is established is that they will be identified through a procedure that the most representative business and union organizations can initiate jointly, and that the request must be resolved within a maximum period of six months.
There are eight groups to which a different early retirement regime is currently applied depending on the activity. They are miners, flight personnel, railroad workers, artists, bullfighters, firefighters, ertzainas and local police officers. “It is not calculated in the same way in each group,” explains Álvaro Granado, from the Pensions area of KPMG Abogados. For aerial work flight personnel, for example, a reduction coefficient of 0.40 is applied to the period actually worked for pilots and 0.30 for mechanics. For its part, in the local police, this coefficient remains at 0.20 of the years actually worked.
