The Supreme Court has established in a ruling that the unemployment benefit for 52-year-olds can only be received if the beneficiary has registered as a jobseeker since he lost his job, and not since he reached that age. The judges ruled in favor of the administration against a man from Cantabria who had worked as a self-employed person for more than a decade and who registered as a jobseeker three months before his 52nd birthday, even though he had stopped working for more than a year.
According to the State Public Employment Service (SEPE), this benefit is intended for people aged 52 or over who have exhausted all contributory benefits or unemployment benefits, have contributed to unemployment between 90 and 359 days and have been registered as applicants for unemployment benefits. . employment with maximum interruptions of three months. In Spain, according to the latest data available from the SEPE, more than 445,000 people benefit from this public unemployment aid, 53% of whom are women.
The courts issued this decision following the case of a man from Cantabria who, according to his allegations, was registered as self-employed between 2005 and 2015 and re-registered between 2016 and 2018. He did not register as a job seeker until February 2019, a few months before turning 52 and six months before applying for this unemployment benefit. By then, he had been paying into Social Security for more than 25 years of his working life.
The High Court of Cantabria initially ruled in his favour and recognised the subsidy, taking into account his quarter century of contributions in relation to the months in which he was not registered as unemployed. The Supreme Court annulled this decision and explained that since the regulations had lowered the bar for this aid from 55 to 52 years, there is a condition for those who do not meet it at the time of their registration as unemployed to be able to access it, as in the case of this man: it is necessary to be “registered without interruption as a job seeker until the date on which he reaches that age and then be able to apply for the aid”.
For the Supreme Court, the obligation to be permanently registered as a job seeker does not begin at the age of 52, but from the moment one becomes unemployed.
The purpose of this subsidy is “to protect the situations of lack of protection of those who seek employment and do not find employment before reaching the age of 52, and not of those who voluntarily withdraw from the world of work without even seeking employment, and intend to receive the subsidy at the age of 52.
In this case, they understand that this former self-employed worker from Cantabria worked as a self-employed person for two periods but “without registering as a job seeker for more than a year at the end of the first of them” nor at the end of his second stage as a self-employed person. He only registered three months before his 52nd birthday. Until then, the Supreme Court states, he had not shown “any intention to continue actively looking for work”, which now prevents him from being eligible for aid.
