The Government partner assures that he will avoid this change, which has already passed through the Council of Ministers, if it involves a cut to future retirement
The opposition to the commitment to modify the number of years that Social Security will take into account to calculate the retirement pension has reached Minister José Luis Escrivá from his own government partner. The Minister of Social Rights, Ione Belarra, has guaranteed that her formation will not accept cuts in pensions “neither present nor future”, and has insisted that it is “false” that Europe demands a reduction.
Belarra’s observations contrast with the document sent by the Council of Ministers itself, of which it forms part before the summer, to the European Commission, and initialed this week before Brussels. In this text, Spain undertakes to “extend” (as expressly stated in its English version) the period for calculating pensions to adapt it to new working lives, marked by gaps such as unemployment or an ERE.
The social impact that the measure could have has led Belarra to oppose it. “We are at a time when the Government is required to offer certainty and security to the people and, of course, I am committed to that,” he said this Friday in Valladolid.
Also the Secretary of State for Social Rights and person in charge of the economic area of Podemos, Nacho Álvarez, has spoken about it. Although it has done so with an issue that the Minister of Social Security had already settled: the possibility of expanding that pension calculation with the last 35 years of contributions – compared to the current 24 and the 25 that will govern from January. Álvarez has warned that extending the period to those 35 years “is not a measure included in the Toledo Pact, it is not in the coalition agreement and it is not part of the social dialogue.” “And it would imply a cut in many future benefits that United We Can not accept,” he stressed in a message on social networks as a “warning for the future”, they indicate in his department, aware that this possibility of 35 years was parked .
Escrivá himself already denied this week that extending to those 35 years was on the table. He described this idea as “a summer snake that Pablo Iglesias started a year ago and that comes out from time to time.” He also explained that the recommendations of the Toledo Pact did require that the new realities of the labor market and the existence of “more volatile careers” be taken into account in the pension calculation system, where the last years of contributions did not always they are the best.
Range of possibilities
The extension of the number of years in the calculation would benefit approximately a third of the contributors, who are those who have a working life with some ‘gaps’, such as periods of unemployment or ERE in their last active years. On the contrary, it would harm those who have short careers or have increased their contribution over the years, as well as the self-employed who tend to contribute more in the last years of their professional activity.
The crossing of statements has been increasing throughout the week after the signing of the document of commitments acquired by Spain before Brussels this week. It remains to be specified how this measure of extension of the calculations will materialize, an issue that will be addressed within the social dialogue during 2022. And without that reference, public friction has arisen between the Government partners.
It will be throughout the next year when they negotiate what this expansion of the calculation will be; whether it will affect the entire population or only some groups; how the so-called labor ‘gaps’ will be covered and to what extent is the new formula for establishing future pensions.
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