On the latest Monday, Spain’s Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations held its second meeting with employers and unions to discuss changes to pension rules. The minister, Elma Saiz, is seeking to regulate early retirement and proposes advancing the retirement age for workers in sectors with high absence and accident rates. This is part of the first draft sent to social partners and reflects areas where the negotiating sides are not fully aligned, as some variables and the current official statistics to back those indices remain a point of contention.
Currently, Spanish law already allows certain groups to retire before the standard age, which in 2024 stands at 66 years and six months, without reducing their pension. Local police, railway workers, and firefighters employed by public administrations and agencies are examples of groups that can retire earlier under existing rules.
Now the Government is negotiating amendments to the conditions that justify early retirement for some collectives while not for others. Social Security negotiators have suggested taking into account factors such as the incidence, persistence, and duration of sick leave, as well as permanent disabilities or fatalities that may result, according to sources from the department led by Saiz.
Gender bias concerns
The immediate challenge is that the initial proposal has not convinced the social partners. The negotiation is expected to be lengthy, with months of documents and back-and-forth, but the first draft is seen as having plenty of room for improvement, particularly by the unions. In the previous meeting, during the early phase of the current legislature, the unions warned that the government’s approach could indirectly introduce gender biases.
In highly feminized sectors, such as housekeeping room staff, occupational illnesses are often under-detected, and since many workers need the income, many do not take sick leave. Instead they continue working while medicated. According to union sources, such a pattern would likely be excluded from the objective indices the ministry aims to construct in Social Security calculations.
During negotiations in the prior legislature, both the government and social partners anticipated changes to the reducing coefficients. For example, they agreed to review which professions could qualify for these reductions roughly every ten years.
Any change to early retirement rules directly affects companies because sectors deemed as arduous face higher Social Security contributions. The aim is to bolster public coffers by encouraging shorter working lives. Expanding the list of arduous occupations would raise labor costs for firms or for the Administration itself.
At present, around seventy cases from associations, businesses, or workers are awaiting recognition that their profession deserves early retirement and thus a potential path to earlier access. Social Security must decide whether to resolve these cases before or after reaching a consensus on the new rules with the social partners.
The negotiations are ongoing, and in the coming days the government is expected to send a written proposal to employers and unions on partial retirement and succession contracts, two priorities that remained unresolved in the previous legislature. It is also possible that Social Security will include ideas to maximize incentives for workers to extend their working life beyond the standard retirement age and to allow the partial pension to be combined with part of their salary.
Attribution: Government sources quoted by the Department of Social Security