About twenty meetings, “hundreds of calls” and “hours of negotiation and dialogue”. The pension system reform It is already a reality. This was announced at the end of July by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, in his half-yearly report. However, it was this Wednesday that the official signing took place, in which the social agents who made it possible to reach this agreement, which for Sánchez is “product of good policy.”
Specifically, the presidents of CEOE and Cepyme, Antonio Garamendi and Gerardo Cuerva, and the secretaries of CCOO and UGT, Unai Sordo and Pepe Álvarez, attended this event. The Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, Elma Saiz, was also present. But what does this pact consist of?
In accordance with what was put forward this summer and reaffirmed this Wednesday by Sánchez, the agreement envisages “three important things”. On the one hand, the president stressed “the improvement of the compatibility between retirement and work”. Something that allows to guarantee “the transition towards a flexible retirement adapted to each person”, explained the socialist on the day of the announcement.
A flexibility that affects active, deferred and early retirement. In the case of the latter, the agreement extends the deadline for requesting it from two to three years with limits on the reduction of working hours, while for the former it will no longer be necessary to have “a career with full contributions”. An issue that the Saiz ministry considered to have “a particular impact (…) from a gender perspective”.
Regarding the postponement of retirement, “the possibility of benefiting from a additional incentive for every six months of delay from the second year and not just every twelve months” as was the case until now. Furthermore, the agreement also provides for the recovery of “the multiplier coefficient of 1.5” for “discontinuous permanent workers”.
The President indicated that the second important point of this agreement corresponds to the protection of “workers exercising harder, more dangerous and more exposed to risks” through the creation of “coefficients reducing the retirement age” professions of this type of employment on the basis of “the incidence, persistence and duration of sick leave processes; as well as declarations of permanent disability and death,” the text of the agreement reads.
Likewise, Sánchez highlighted the point of the text in which it is contemplated “better use of mutual resources to restore workers’ health”. More specifically, the agreement provides that this greater efficiency will be pursued through the regulation of the “framework for signing agreements” between the Ministries of Health and insurance organizations regarding “the performance of diagnostic tests in pathologies of trauma origin.”
