Firefighters, railway workers, flight staff and local police are some of the eight groups to which a differentiated early retirement regime is currently applied because they are considered risky activities. They can 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 retire 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? Depending on the morbidity or mortality rates.
It is the proposal that the Ministry of Inclusion and Social Security has put forward this week to social agents to establish the so-called reducing coefficients that will regulate this anticipation of the retirement age. First of all, a limit. In no case can you access the pension with less than 52 years of age. And then, three indices to identify the occupations to which it will apply. One of the indexes is based on the total of benefits for sick leave divided by the sum of the contribution bases; a second calculates the total number of casualties divided by the number of workers exposed to the 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 deal with the case of other activities in specific sectors in which the rate of illness or death is not high but in which the physical requirements or psychics to carry out the work from a certain age entail a certain difficulty. In these cases, a working group will be created, with representatives from various ministries, unions and employers to study their possible inclusion.
An element to add is that, in order to maintain the sustainability of the system, the extra expense that the early retirement of these workers will entail will be compensated by an increase in their contribution to Social Security. This increase will take the form of “an additional type of 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 has had access. It is an extra contribution that will be established every year in the general budgets of the State.
“It is a proposal to continue negotiating” indicate from the unions and point out that it will be necessary “an improvement of the indices it proposes, some are surplus and others are missing”. They also add that it is necessary to improve the definition of penalty for physical or mental requirements linked to age.
One of the points still open is which activities will be the ones that can be accommodated in this regime. What is established is that they will be identified through a procedure that can be initiated jointly by the most representative business and trade union organizations, and that the request must be resolved within 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, railwaymen, artists, bullfighters, firemen, ertzaines and local police. “It is not calculated in the same way for each group”, explains Álvaro Granado, from the pensions area of ??KPMG Abogados. In the flight personnel of aerial jobs, for example, a reduction coefficient of 0.40 is applied to pilots and 0.30 to mechanics to the period effectively worked. For its part, in the local police this coefficient is 0.20 of the years actually worked.
