Escrivá offers a 30% increase, the highest salary and maximum long-term pension quoted.

The Ministry of Social Security, led by José Luis Escriva, is proposing a 30% increase in the highest wages for the next 30 years, according to negotiating sources, and El Periódico has gone ahead. This figure is still not closed, it is still the focus of negotiations in the social dialogue on pensions, with trade unions demanding more “demolition” than this figure. Escrivá plans to increase the maximum pension by the same proportion, but not in 30 years, but later, when the workers who contributed the most retire.

In addition, the Ministry also agrees to amend the MEI (mechanism for intergenerational equality) as requested in Brussels. Escrivá proposes to maintain the 0.6 points of additional pension contributions until 2050, instead of doing so until 2032, as originally legislated.

Negotiations on pensions are currently progressing intensively, albeit in bilateral and cautious meetings, without a formal invitation to the negotiating table. This is the format of the discussion that has been chosen in this last part of the most complex pension reform, which includes the increase of the highest salaries, but also the revision of the calculation years for calculating the pension.

30% or more increase?

Spain is one of the EU countries with the lowest wages. The limit, the so-called “maximum contribution base”, is set at 4,139 gross euros per month in 2022. Salaries above this amount do not contribute to social security.

Thanks to this limit, about “€35,000 million” per year in wages for the highest-paid workers who do not contribute to the system, when they exceed this limit, the Ministry of Social Protection answers the questions of this medium.

Thus, Escriva’s ministry is proposing to increase this maximum base by 30%, according to negotiating sources, which the unions are seeking to increase. This extra 30% will be very progressive over the coming decades and in addition to inflation, which the Minister has already advanced, which will be the base to which the maximum base will be updated and also pensions.

CCOO and UGT are more ambitious in this matter, considering that the best paid workers should contribute as well as the rest of the workers. There is a lot of room for a total “collapse” of top wages before that 30% increase, and negotiations insist that figure won’t close.

Doubts whether businessmen will agree

And there’s a margin, too, because it’s still not clear that employers are going to stick to this latest pension deal. In such a case, trade unions ask the government to deepen its approach.

Employers have been facing some paralysis in negotiations with the government and unions since the summer as a result of next week’s internal elections to re-elect the board of directors and the president. All indications are that Antonio Garamendi will be re-elected, although an alternative candidate has emerged from the Catalan employers’ association, which is a clear sign of some opposition to the current leader.

In this context, employers are very careful not to take any wrong step that could harm Garamen. Once the election process is over, unions and the government hope that normalcy will return to the open negotiating table, but there are doubts that this will happen. Another electoral process is on the horizon, a political one that some fear will affect social dialogue, with less agreement underpinning the coalition government’s actions before the election.