The Government will modify the order that regulates the conditions so that former scholarship holders, who worked on research tasks or carried out non-work internships before 2006, can recover the contribution for the work they carried out. The Secretary of State for Social Security and Pensions, Borja Suárez, announced this Monday that his department is already working on improving the conditions of the special agreement, after the unions and those affected themselves repeatedly expressed their complaints.
The possibility of rescuing contribution periods could affect hundreds of thousands of people who completed their university or vocational training internships, according to the union centers. More serious is the case of researchers and the scientific community who have spent a significant number of years without paying contributions. The Ministry of Inclusion. On May 1, Social Security and Migration published the ministerial order that will regulate this special agreement and just a few days later it confirmed that it will rectify it.
The Secretary of State for Social Security, Borja Suárez, has advanced that the ministry “will listen to everyone, assess the contributions that the unions have made and adopt additional measures.” The number two of the ministry later specified that “adjustments” will be made to the published standard that did not have the consensus of social dialogue.
Since May 1, the unions have been asking to modify the conditions of the aforementioned special agreement so that former scholarship recipients can recover contribution periods. In this sense, Comisiones Obreras proposes as a first measure to extend coverage to five full years. This was made known to the ministry at the Social Security Table held today. The union justifies this proposal by explaining that there has been a delay in the entry into force of the obligation to contribute for companies and educational centers for unpaid internships. The agreement was sealed in July 2021 but has not been implemented until January 2024.
Furthermore, these five full years of recovered contributions should not be exclusive of the 2-year period that was already provided for in the 2021 agreement, defends CCOO. That is, the union center proposes being able to rescue up to seven years of internships.
The modification of contribution requirements is another demand raised by the unions. They argue that the conditions required of former scholarship recipients are too demanding and that not all of them could agree to recover these contributions due to their current level of income. In this sense, they propose recovering the scheme of the 2011 agreement, when the contribution bases of the periods in which the interns’ internships took place were taken into consideration, and not the current ones. A coefficient of 0.77 was also set on the contribution rate and the door was opened to being able to split the contributions.
The ministerial order to recover the contributions of former scholarship holders will come into force on June 1. The ministry has opened the possibility today of also modifying that date.
