Hospitality employers have begun work on the creation of a pension fund like the one that has just started construction with the aim that 1.9 million workers, many of them waiters, can have a supplement when retiring. The project is in its embryonic stage, but if it goes ahead it would become the most far-reaching sectoral plan in Spain and could lead to a shake-up in the employment landscape.
The initiative is the result of the company reform last year by the Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security to fiscally incentivize this type of simplified employment pension plans to the detriment of individual ones. The idea is to comply with one of the recommendations of the Toledo Pact and of the Independent Fiscal Responsibility Authority (Airef) and ensure that workers in labor-intensive sectors, generally with lower salaries, can benefit from this formula savings for retirement.
The general secretary of Hospitality of Spain, Emilio Gallego, explains that the association has already maintained contacts with the Minister of Social Security, José Luis Escrivá, and with the construction sector to analyze this particular waiter’s pension fund. “The uncertainty of pensions is high and Spain is committed to diversifying its sources of generation”, says Gallego, whose business confederation represents 300,000 companies at state level.
At the moment what there are are some “first contacts” and “interest” in the initiative that serves as a “mirror”, the one that has just been launched by the construction sector, the new pension fund, managed by VidaCaixa, which it started a few days ago. “We are very supportive of the construction sector”, says Gallego. A negotiation with the unions has not yet been opened nor has the approach that serves as a basis been formulated, but the impression is that “it is more a point of coincidence than of divergence”.
The reference is the pension plan activated by the National Construction Confederation (CNC) for 1.4 million workers, which was launched on Saturday 23 September with the publication in the BOE. The first contributions will start to be received from October and the aim is to accumulate a savings bag of between 3,000 and 3,500 million euros in ten years.
The builders’ plan has in its favor that it has been included in the sector’s collective agreement and that the contributions made by the companies are mandatory. They will be carried out as part of the agreed wage increases.
The hospitality industry does not have a general collective agreement, but more than a dozen provincial or regional agreements. Yes, there is, on the other hand, the State Labor Agreement for the Hospitality sector, the ALEH, which can accommodate a measure of this type, and a foundation to articulate it, although its operation is not without complexities. These factors add to the hospitality industry a difficulty that does not exist in construction.
Omar Rodríguez, the federal secretary of the hospitality sector at the UGT, indicates that the employer has not yet communicated the idea of ??the pension plan to the unions, who will analyze it in detail. “It depends on how you approach it. You need to know the model in depth and talk about it well”, he says.
The new regulation of employment pension plans, contained in law 12/2022 of July last year, includes advantages for companies and workers to join the idea. The former see reduced Social Security contributions and improve employee loyalty. The latter lower their personal income tax, as the limit on the deduction of this tax for contributions to pension plans is raised from 1,500 to 10,000 (8,500 is added to the 1,500 with joint company and employee contributions according to established scales) .
The legislative changes also bring a new paradigm for the financial sector, accustomed to managing the individual savings of its clients. The association of investment entities Inverco has already warned of a predictable decrease in private pension plans due to this aspect from this year. Until July, individual plans accumulated assets for 84,418 million euros, 512 million less than a year earlier.
Law 12/2022 also penalizes deduction limits for private pension plans, which go from 2,000 euros to 1,500 euros. This factor contributes, according to Inverco, to the fact that in 2022 individual plans closed for the second consecutive year with more exits than entries. The gap was almost 670 million, seven times more than in 2021.
However, the need for technical and professional management of employment plans is also giving opportunities to firms traditionally focused on private plans.
