The Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia has ruled in favor of a worker with 38 years and 6 months of contributions and a total permanent disability who had been denied a retirement pension by Social Security. The ruling understands that the circumstances of the case require the legal requirements to be read flexibly, even if on paper it did not reach the minimum contribution required in the fifteen years prior to requesting the pension.
The affected person had chained different jobs until adding 38 years and 6 months of contributions throughout his entire working life. Even so, when he turned 65 and submitted the application on March 22, 2022, Social Security rejected the pension.
Social Security refuses to recognize permanent disability due to a work accident for employees who suffer injuries resulting from reckless negligence.
He claims 12,185.24 euros in arrears of 20% of his permanent disability pension, Social Security only pays him three months and the court denies it for requesting it late
The argument was that the worker did not meet the specific deficiency, which requires that he have contributed for at least two years within the fifteen years prior to the causative event. According to the data collected in the ruling, he credited 590 days of contributions compared to the 730 required by the General Social Security Law in its article 205.b.
Although he was registered as a job seeker between 2008 and 2021, Social Security understood that at the time of requesting the pension he was no longer registered or assimilated to registration. Since 2020, he had a total permanent disability due to emphysema with basal dyspnea that had left him out of the labor market, and those final years, along with some occasional interruption as a job seeker, were the ones that broke the count of the last fifteen.
After exhausting the administrative claim, the worker took the case to court and managed to have his right to a pension recognized.
Parenthesis doctrine
The Social Court number 35 of Barcelona upheld the claim and declared his right to collect the retirement pension. The resolution was based on a flexible reading of the specific deficiency adapted to the circumstances of the case.
The court applied the so-called parenthesis doctrine, a principle that allows periods without contributions to be deducted when the lack of work does not depend on the will of the worker himself. The key was in the more than thirteen years registered as a job seeker between May 20, 2008 and July 22, 2021. From that date and until the application, the worker stopped appearing as a job seeker, but the ruling considered that this interruption of about eight months was brief and was justified by the pathology he suffered, with multiple hospital admissions.
In this way, it allows the calculation of the specific deficiency to be carried back to the moment in which the obligation to contribute ceased, and in that period the plaintiff did meet the required two years.
Right to retirement pension
Social Security appealed to the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia. He argued that total permanent disability is not a situation assimilated to discharge and, therefore, it was not appropriate to apply the parenthesis. The TSJ agrees with him on this point: the ruling recalls that total permanent disability is not among the situations assimilated to the discharge of Royal Decree 84/1996, but rejects the appeal because the assimilation that the court appreciates does not rest on the disability, but on the more than thirteen consecutive years as a job seeker and on the brief and justified nature of the last interruption.
With those 38 years and 6 months of contributions, the worker receives 100% of the regulatory base, set at 1,038.65 euros per month. The ruling also obliges Social Security to pay pension arrears from March 22, 2022, the date on which the initial application was submitted.