The government is meeting today with social agents to address future pension reform

This Tuesday, October 13th, Minister of Integration, Social Security and Immigration, José Luis Escreve, will meet with employers and unions to begin addressing the future reform of the pension system just like the negotiations of the Parliamentary Committee for the Toledo Agreement. I entered the final stage.

The meeting will take place at 7:00 pm and will be attended by, among others, the Minister of Inclusion, Social Security and Immigration, José Luis Escreve, and the leaders of CCOO, UGT, CEOE and Cepyme, Unai Sordo, Pepe lvarez and Antonio Garamendi and Gerardo Cuerva respectively.

The idea of ​​this meeting, according to government sources that clarified to Europa Press, is to transfer the proposals that are in the mind of the executive branch to the social agents, based on the recommendations on which the Toledo Charter works, to know their assessment in this regard.

Escref confirmed last week that he plans to include pension reform in the national recovery plan, in order to receive funds to tackle the Covid crisis, and that he hopes to remove all social security expenditures from the public pension system that have been identified as inappropriate throughout the legislature. Until 2023.

The minister hopes to transfer about 23 billion euros to the state’s general budgets, an amount that has been identified as expenditures that should not be faced with social contributions, with a first bill for the following public accounts in which the government operates.

Consequently, he emphasized that in the spending ceiling approved by the Executive Authority last week, “there is a big clause for an important amendment in the 2021 budget.”

“We will take a first step as soon as Parliament recommends it to us,” Eskrif said, “but in a preventive manner, the spending ceiling left enough room for this to be the case,” before adding that he hoped “to command the entire income and expenditure system in this legislature completely.”

“We have to explain what we do with the pensions.”

Escref claimed that “there is no better time than now to close the consensus” on pensions, acknowledging that both Congress, in the Toledo Charter, and the government are “speeding up their” work “to give certainty and remove elements of uncertainty” regarding the future of the current and future pension system.

“We have to explain what we will do with the pensions, it is one of the structural reforms that have been identified and that Brussels is asking of us,” he said, noting that therefore “it is very time” because the Toledo Charter “is about” to close a deal.

Moreover, he asserted that the government has a “somewhat advanced plan” that can be incorporated into the plans that go to the recovery plan. Effective retirement age approach to legal age and strengthening of supplementary systems.

With regard to delays in retirement age and prolongation of working life, Escreve reiterated on several occasions that the current incentives are poorly designed and must be corrected so that they are not reactionary, but ultimately neutral or progressive. “In this field, its idea is to make concrete proposals in this regard.

With regard to the strengthening of complementary systems, its goal is to ensure that these plans begin to form among “low and middle income” people, in “adherence to operating plans through collective bargaining and supplementary plans.”

Repeal repair 2013

On the part of the unions, it is necessary to address the reform of the pension system to take into account the 2011 agreement signed between unions and business organizations, which provided for a gradual postponement of retirement until the year 67, until 2027.

Likewise, the UGT and CCOO see it necessary to abolish the 2013 reform, which separated pension modernization from CPI, and to permanently eliminate the so-called sustainability factor, whose implementation has been suspended until 2023.

Pension negotiations with unions and employers began only when the Committee to Monitor and Evaluate the Toledo Charter Agreements faced the final stage of a final renewal of its recommendations.

The groups are working around the draft they already had in the last legislature so that they do not lose all of the achievements reached at the time.

Although many spokespersons, especially senior members of the committee, resisted setting times, many representatives of the groups expected the imperative to reach a close agreement to close the recommendations.

“A month, a month and a half” or “two or three weeks” are some of the deadlines given to Europa Press by spokespeople in informal talks, in which they comment that the government, in addition to being interested in introducing an agreement, is also pursuing reforms. In the general pension system in its next budgets, with the first actions.

This is the case, for example, of the aforementioned process to remove those identified as inappropriate expenditures from social security accounts, which must be funded through budgets of about € 20,000 million – Minister José Luis Escreve estimated at 23,000 million. Improper expenses “before the commission itself.