Negotiations are underway to expand the number of activities with early retirement as they are considered risky and there is an approximation between what Social Security proposes and what social agents are looking for, although there are still open points. One of these obstacles is the unions' demand that not only the risk that the activity entails be taken into account, but also how painful it is. That is, not only is it assessed whether the activity is dangerous, toxic or unhealthy, but also its level of hardship, especially in relation to the age of the person practicing it.
It is a field where home help, caregivers of the elderly and also housekeepers, known as kellys, could enter. Activities that are not risky, but that after a certain age may cause difficulties for the worker to carry them out. “It is a very feminized hardship. "These are activities basically carried out by women," say union sources, who urge the establishment of objective criteria for the degree of hardship and age.
It is a possibility that the current draft decree already contemplates, but based on the creation of a specific working group to develop it. It is said that this group will value “occupations, categories or professional activities in specific sectors where the physical or psychological requirements of performing work from an age onwards entail hardship, but high rates of morbidity or mortality are not proven.” However, what the unions are demanding is that they enter into the same operating mechanism as dangerous activities. That is, not a working group to begin evaluating it, but rather they already enter the procedure in which it is the business and union organizations that initiate the process, and whose request must be resolved within a maximum period of six months.
Neither the dangerous nor the arduous activities that will be eligible for this special retirement regime are explicitly mentioned in the draft decree law; what is established are the criteria through which they will be identified. It will be done with three indices on the relationship between sick leave expenditure and contribution bases, the number of sick leave and the number of exposed workers and finally, the number of deaths and the number of workers.
The big difference lies in the method in how these risky activities will be chosen, and if the criteria of the unions prevail, also the painful ones. It will be carried out based on objective criteria pre-assigned in advance, and not by political decisions, as is the case of the eight activities that currently already enjoy early retirement due to being risky. This is the case of miners, flight personnel, railway workers, artists, bullfighters, firefighters, ertzainas and local police officers; in each case with different reducing coefficients and standards.
In all these cases, it was due to a political decision at a certain time. Now, the approach for the future is to be based on objective criteria and for the most representative business and union organizations to propose the activities that they consider meet these parameters.
If in the definition of the reducing coefficients that allow anticipating the retirement age there is rapprochement between the Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security and the social agents, it is further away in other issues, such as partial retirement and the use of mutual insurance companies for testing. diagnoses of trauma sick leave and therapeutic treatments, to lighten the burden that now falls exclusively on Social Security.
There is agreement on the principle of using mutual insurance companies, an element that is already included in the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC) signed by employers and unions, but not on how to do it. The CEOE wants a door open to the maximum for mutual companies, Social Security a minimum of use, and on the other hand the unions demand to limit the opening with precision. “The worker has to give his approval at each step, a generic initial authorization for the intervention of the mutual insurance companies is not useful,” say union sources.
Another element in which there is no progress is partial retirement and the subsequent relief contracts. Once again, at the end of last year the use of these relief contracts was provisionally extended, but a general framework has not yet been established. In addition, unions demand expanding the use of relief contracts, now limited to the manufacturing industry, to other sectors. This contract is what allows the partial retirement of a veteran to be combined with the progressive introduction of a young worker, thus favoring generational change.
