The Congress of Deputies is going to debate this week a motion presented by Podemos in which they ask to eliminate the reducing coefficients on early retirements when the worker has accumulated at least 40 years of contributions to Social Security. The proposal, which is not legislative in nature, aims for the Government to promote a reform in the law to eliminate penalties on the pension of those who seek to retire before reach retirement age.
The Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration, Elma Saiz, already rejected this possibility in a plenary session of the Congress of Deputies, opening a bitter debate among retirees. At the time, he recalled that the current rule already contemplates certain compensation mechanisms for those who add long contribution careers.
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During her intervention, the minister appealed to the Royal Decree of 2021 (it can be read in this BOE) that introduced the financial supplement for those people who retired early between 2002 and 2021 when they accredited at least 45 years and 6 months of contributions, or 40 years when the pension was less than 900 euros per month. The latest data from the Ministry indicate that approximately 104,000 pensioners have received this supplement.
Podemos believes that this is insufficient, and that more than 900,000 workers continue to be penalized even though they have contributed for 40 years. Therefore, he considers that this is “discrimination” against those who began their working lives very young. The motion that will be voted on in Congress seeks for the PSOE to position itself explicitly, forcing them to vote.
The pension reform links the annual update to the CPI
This debate reopens issues such as equality in access to a Social Security retirement pension. The pension reform Signed in 2021 after negotiating it with the social dialogue table, it linked the annual update of pensions to the data of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), reinforcing the sustainability of the system through incentives for delaying retirement.
It did not modify the penalties applied to early retirements, this being a historic demand of the unions for those workers who have long contributions careers.
For now, eliminating the reducing coefficients for all cases with more than 50 years of contributions implies an additional cost for Social Security that the Government cannot add and Saiz defends that the priority is to “guarantee the purchasing power of all pensioners without risking the viability of the system.”