Early retirement is a social security modality that allows you to advance retirement age both voluntarily and involuntarily, which leads to the application of reducing coefficients. Now, in the case of professions of special risk or pains such as miners, flight personnel, railways or firefighters had reducing coefficients that allow them to retire before without suffering these penalties in the amount of their pension. However, this benefit did not apply to forest firefighters, despite performing surveillance and fire extinction tasks with similar danger conditions.
In this sense, Alfonso Muñoz Cuenca, a social security officer specialized in pensions, explained in a video on his YouTube channel that this discrimination was corrected with the entry into force of Law 5/2024, of November 18, basic of the forest firefighter. Alfonso explains that “in the fourth additional provision it is established that the retirement regime of the personnel under this law, that is, of forest firefighters, are governed by the provisions of the regulations on specific social security applicable to firefighters at the service of administrations and public bodies.”
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What does this change mean for forest firefighters
The key to this equalization is found in Royal Decree 383/2008, of March 14 (which can be consulted in this Official State Gazette), which regulates the early retirement of firefighters. Said Royal Decree establishes that:
- The required ordinary age can be reduced by applying a 0.20 coefficient for each year worked as a firefighter.
- In no case can the pension be accessed before the age of 60, unless at least 35 years quoted, in which case the limit falls at age 59.
- The reduced time computes as quoted, in order to calculate the percentage on the regulatory basis of the pension.
With Law 5/2024, these same criteria now apply to forest firefighters, who may benefit from the same rights as municipal, autonomic or public bodies.
For example, for a 61 -year -old forest firefighter with 35 years quoted and 20 of them working in fire extinction, the 0.20 reducing coefficient can apply. This means that at those 20 years 4 years of the legal retirement age are discounted, being able to withdraw at 61 without penalty. In addition, if it adds 35 years quoted in total, it could even do it at 59, since the decree sets that threshold as a minimum limit
Solve the early retirements already presented
“Interestingly, in the next paragraph of the law, it is indicated that within one year from the entry into force, the necessary measures will be taken for the recognition of all the time worked in the surveillance and extinction activity of forest fires for the granting of these reducing coefficients,” says Muñoz. As this official explains, this implies that the National Social Security Institute must order its provincial addresses to apply these reducing coefficients in the early retirement applications submitted.
“Several union organizations consider, and rightly so, that it has already passed more than enough for the Ministry to order the different provincial directions of the INSS that resolve all those early retirements of forest firefighters that have already been requested,” says the official. They claim that early retirements are already resolved in process, since the legal framework is already defined.
The comparison of forest firefighters with the rest of the Firefighters has been the result of years of mobilizations and protests. Legal recognition involves ending a historical inequality that maintained this group in a situation of inferiority despite performing functions with a high level of risk, physical effort and exposure to dangers.
With this reform, forest firefighters will not only be able to retire before, but will officially see that their activity is exceptionally painful nature as that of the rest of the body.