A 71-year-old retiree has managed to get the Supreme Court to recognize his right to collect his retirement pension, after having paid Social Security contributions for more than 55 years, he was denied it for not complying with the “specific deficiency“Social Security understood that he had only contributed 376 days, since he works part-time, but the High Court says no, that one day of work counts as one day of contributions regardless of the type of day.
According to the ruling, Cayetano decided to request a retirement pension from Social Security after having contributed more than 55 years to Social Security throughout his entire working life, but this was denied. The reason is that it did not meet the specific requirement, that is, of the total years of contributions, at least two must be within the last 15 years prior to the causative event (this is included in the article 205 of the General Law of Social Security).
The reason is that, despite working for almost 36 years within the General Regime and then 18 years as self-employed, she returned to the General Regime with a part-time contract at 50% of the day between the end of 2017 and December 2019. That last period caused her to accumulate 376 days of contributions for Social Security, instead of the 730 days required by the regulations.
Due to this situation and after several denied claims, the worker decided to go to court, since in his opinion he had contributed enough to be entitled to a contributory retirement pension.
The bias coefficient is a discriminatory measure
Although the Social Court no. 8 of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands did not agree with him, since they understood that he did not comply with the specific deficiency due to the application of the bias coefficient in his last years of work, this was not the case in the Supreme Court, where he did agree.
The High Court was clear and said that “each day, month or year of contributions is equivalent to a day, month or year of deficiency in the same terms of full-time work.” On the other hand, I explain that “the method thus implemented punishes, above all, workers with the lowest percentage of partiality throughout their working life, that is, those who make up the weakest link in the labor market.”
In this way and given that for the court the partial is “lacking the first of the requirements for constitutionally admissible inequality of treatment, its objective and reasonable justification” they recognized their right to collect the retirement pension, by counting their working hours as full days for contribution purposes.
Elimination of bias coefficients
In this sentence we must pay attention to the partial coefficients and the Royal Decree 2/2023although in previous instances it is not in force, the Supreme Court did take it into account. This norm, known as “the Escrivá reform”, introduced a measure that came from Europe and was the elimination of bias coefficients. That is to say, a day worked is a day paid for in the eyes of Social Security regardless of the type of day.