The PSOE has raised Social Security contributions without limit in the law creating a pension fund without waiting to consult the measure with the social agents. This has emerged when the socialist parliamentary group accepted an amendment by United We Can to eliminate the cap on the maximum contributions to Social Security. According to the approved amendment, this unstopping is necessary “as a redistributive mechanism” because in this way “the highest incomes contribute with their income.” Currently, the maximum contribution bases affect those who earn more than 45,000 euros. The PSOE has assured after the approval of the amendment that it is “an error” that it will correct in the next parliamentary step.
This is a measure that the Minister of Inclusion, José Luis Escrivá, is considering to ensure the sustainability of the pension system, but he had promised to take it to social dialogue beforehand, which has not happened with this approval.
The spike in prices has not been the only consequence of the chaos in the votes of the Labor Commission. The amendments approved this afternoon also cut tax deductions in employment pension plans that the Minister of Social Security is trying to approve within the reform of the pension system. The problem is that, if there is no correction, it is exposed to a resounding failure.
After having reduced the tax advantages for contributing to individual pension plans to a minimum, considering them elitist, Escrivá proposed transferring those benefits to company plans. With the approved amendments there will be no advantages in one or the other. As approved, tax deductions in personal income tax for contributions to employment pension plans are reduced, from 10,000 euros to 5,750 euros per year.
“This is a shame, if the company pension plans end up being a fiasco, people should know that it will be the fault of the political parties,” they say at the National Confederation of Construction (CNC).
This employer’s association announced last May a preliminary labor agreement by which it was expected to establish the first company pension plans for a total of 1.7 million workers. It would be the perfect boost for the plan that the Government is trying to implement through the Ministry of Social Security but now, if the law is approved as the PSOE has negotiated it in Congress, it threatens to ruin the take-off of the company pension plans. “If this turns out like this, the CNC will withdraw its offer and renegotiate the agreement without any pension plan,” explains Pedro Fernández, president of the CNC.
Socialist and government sources assure that it is “an error” and that the PSOE itself will correct it in the next process of this law in the plenary session of the Congress of Deputies. The error is attributed to the president of the parliamentary Social Security Commission in which the law has been approved and who is none other than the Podemos deputy Antonio Gómez-Reino.
According to the explanation of socialist sources “before starting the vote on the amendments, the Socialist Parliamentary Group has asked the lawyer for the voting script. When the voting began, the voting blocks have been formed and changed.” According to their version, “having arrived at the block of the UP amendments, specifically at the vote on amendments: 57, 58, 59 and 60, the Socialist Parliamentary Group has understood that it was voting for transactional amendment 59 of United We Can, when what being voted on were those block amendments”.
For this reason, “the Socialist Parliamentary Group will present a separate vote so that it can be corrected in the vote that will take place in plenary session next week.”
The Social Security Commission approved this Thursday the opinion of the draft Regulation Law for the Promotion of Employment Pension Plans, in what constitutes the last parliamentary procedure before being submitted to a vote and debate in the Plenary of the Lower House next week, for subsequent submission to the Senate.
The opinion went forward by 19 votes in favor, 12 against and six abstentions. Specifically, they voted in favour, in addition to the PSOE, United We Can, the PRC and the PNV. Bildu and Vox abstained, while Esquerra Republicana, Compromís and Ciudadanos voted against.
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