The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration is finalizing the drafting of a royal decree law with the category of labor personnel. The retirement of this group is paralyzed by the impossibility of the employing administrations to hire replacement workers to replace them, as required by a legal change that came into force in April 2025. Since that date, the administrations have kept on hold the early retirements of this group made up of some 700,000 public sector workers, half of them employees of city councils and universities.
The imminent approval of this royal decree has been one of the issues addressed this Monday at the meeting of the social dialogue table on pensions and sick leave management that the Government keeps open with social agents. This table faced the refusal of the unions to continue with the negotiation of improvements in the management of sick leave due to temporary disability (IT) until two issues were resolved: the aforementioned paralysis of the partial retirements of administrative staff; and the interpretation of the reducing coefficients of early retirees with high regulatory bases.
This last issue has already been resolved with an instruction from the National Social Security Institute, which mandates that the correct interpretation be made to determine the amount of these pensions, as well as the ex officio review since last January of all recognized benefits of this type. The reactivation of the partial retirements of the workforce will be resolved with the decree that finalizes Social Security and that, in theory, will include the content of a principle of agreement that the representatives of the CC OO and UGT unions have reached with the Ministries of Social Security and Public Service. This agreement includes two formulas so that these retirements can be carried out in compliance with the law that requires relievers to have a permanent full-time contract. These routes will consist of the hiring of workers either from a selection process that has already been passed, or the hiring of interim workers whose position will be
In principle, the royal decree law will only include this modification in the hiring of relievers for partial retirements of public administration staff, which is the only one that has this type of retirement approved and regulated in which the retirement age can be advanced between two and three years in exchange for reducing the working day and salary proportionally and having the rest of the work done by a worker with a relief contract signed for this purpose. However, the confederal secretary of Public Policies and Social Protection of the Workers’ Commissions, Carlos Bravo, has indicated that the unions have also demanded that the Executive include in that decree the recognition of partial retirement for the rest of the public employees (career and interim and statutory civil servants), something that the Government also agreed with CC OO and UGT and is currently in an amendment to the Public Service Law, the processing of which is stuck in Parliament.
Measures that are not controversial
However, Bravo has insisted that said decree should only include measures that are “non-controversial and that meet the consensus not only of all social agents but also of a clear parliamentary majority” so that there is a total guarantee that it will be consolidated in the Congress of Deputies, in the month following its publication by the Official State Gazette (BOE). In this scenario, sources attending the meeting have indicated that the Government would be interested in including some (which are also negotiated at this table) but the unions emphasize that the norm only includes issues whose parliamentary approval is assured.
Among these other measures that this table will address and that could be easier to be endorsed by sufficient consensus are, for example, the recognition of widow’s pensions in relationships not registered as a de facto couple, but that have children and a creditable cohabitation; or the recognition of early retirement coefficients without cuts for cabin crew (TCP) in the air sector, as stated by the head of Social Security and Employment policies at UGT, Cristina Estévez. “The rest of the most controversial measures can continue to be debated at this table,” CC OO insists.
Precisely, at this Monday’s meeting, the unions have conveyed to the Government their proposal to improve IT management, where two proposals stand out, which will not be easy to agree on. The first is to modify the law so that. Secondly, they propose that mutual insurance companies be obliged to treat musculoskeletal diseases that workers consider they have acquired due to the characteristics of their job until they are cured. And only once the worker has been cured, if the mutual insurance company considers that the illness was not linked to their activity, does it claim the amount of this process from public health.
Now, those responsible for Social Security have committed, according to Estévez, to deliver to social agents a new proposal regarding the management of temporary disabilities, after taking into account the contributions of those attending this social dialogue table. For their part, employers are not optimistic about the progress of this negotiation, in which this Monday they have not seen any type of progress, according to the employer sources consulted.
