The Government considers an extraordinary Council of Ministers on Thursday to approve the pension reform

MADRID, 13 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) -

The Government is considering the possibility of convening an extraordinary Council of Ministers this Thursday to approve the pension reform, and thus give the unions time to consult their management bodies beforehand, according to sources from the negotiation to Europa Press .

The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migrations has convened this afternoon, at 4:30 p.m., the social agents, to approach positions on the proposal presented on Friday and the documents that it sent them over the weekend.

Both the UGT and the CCOO demonstrated on Friday, after the meeting, in agreement with the progress and saw the agreement as possible, although they left the negotiation open to the study of those documents and to the meeting on Monday.

The Spanish Confederation of Business Organizations (CEOE) already expressed on Friday its "frontal opposition" to the Executive's proposals on the second leg of the pension reform, so it is not expected to change its mind.

If the Ministry headed by José Luis Escrivá reaches an agreement this afternoon with the unions, they will have to submit the decision to their internal bodies. CCOO plans to meet its Confederal Council on Wednesday morning, according to what union sources have assured Europa Press.

The second leg of the pension reform arrives nearly three months late, since the initial idea of ​​the Government, committed to Brussels, was to present these new measures before December 31, 2022.

The political negotiations were unblocked on Thursday night, after the government coalition partners, PSOE and Unidas Podemos, reached an agreement to carry out the reform.

While waiting for the negotiation with the social agents to introduce some change in the text presented by the Government, the main new features of the reform contemplate the increase in the maximum contribution bases (currently at 4,495 euros), which will take place between 2024 and 2050. This will consist of adding a fixed amount of 1.2 percentage points to the annual amount of the CPI.

For their part, the maximum pensions will be revalued year by year with the annual amount of the CPI plus an additional increase of 0.0115 cumulative percentages each year until 2050. From 2050 to 2065 there will be additional increases.

With the same objective of improving the income of the system, the Government has raised a "solidarity quota" for the part of the salary that is currently not listed due to exceeding the maximum contribution limit. This will be 1% in 2025 and will increase at a rate of 0.25 points per year until it reaches 6% in 2045.

Also, to improve the system's income, the Intergenerational Equity Mechanism or MEI will go from the current 0.6 percentage points to 1.2 percentage points in 2029, at a rate of one tenth increase per year to reinforce the system during the years in which there may be greater tension due to the retirement of the 'baby boom' generation.

Another of the most important measures of this reform to modernize the pension system is the possibility of choosing the period for calculating the pension. For the next 20 years, a dual regime of the computation period will be established, which will allow choosing between these two possibilities: the last 29 years of the degree, discarding the 2 worst years; and the current computation period (last 25 years).

The first possibility will be deployed progressively over 12 years from 2026. The main objective of this standard will be to benefit workers with irregular and precarious careers.