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Until now, Social Security denied the compensatory bonus for maternity to those employees who choose to retire before the legal retirement age
The High Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) endorses that female workers who have agreed to early retirement can collect the maternity accessory, designed to compensate women who see their professional career hampered by having children. The last reform approved in 2021 reformulated this bonus, but until now the criteria applied by the Social Security was to deny it if the worker agreed to retirement before the legal retirement age. The magistrates of the Catalan high court correct the State and open the door so that those workers who had taken early retirement before 2021 and had not been able to access this supplement can now claim it. “The previous exclusion from the maternity supplement of women who agreed to early voluntary retirement was discriminatory and deepened the gender gap,” the TSJC ruled in the ruling won by the law firm Col Lectiu Ronda.
The case dates back to 2017, when a woman – a mother of three children – agrees to early retirement, demands that they pay her the maternity supplement for her pension and Social Security denies it. At that time, the State made the decision based on its own legislation. Legislation that later the European justice endorsed indirectly, by not considering it discriminatory to deny said supplement in cases of early retirement. According to the latest official data, about 750,000 retirees they received maternity supplements before the last reform and a part -undetermined of these- are early retirees.
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Subsequently, the CJEU magistrates themselves recognize that the structure of the maternity supplement is imperfect for several reasons. One was that it discriminated against men, since they could not ask for it. So the Government in 2021 decides to reformulate the complement. This previously added an extra equivalent to 5% of the pension in the case of two children, 10% in the case of three children and 15% in the case of four or more children. On average, Social Security paid 60.64 euros per month for a maternity supplement. And, from now on, it pays a fixed amount of 25 euros per child, men and women can access it and it also covers people who have agreed to early retirement.
“The legislation in force at the date of the causal event was discriminatory and, therefore, inapplicable,” the magistrates affirm in their sentence. From Ronda they have valued that the TSJC “makes an interpretation of the facts subject to the will to widen the limits of the norm to extend its beneficial effects and correction of past grievances to all women who, at a given moment, have suffered the limitations of a legislation considered discriminatory and evidently incapable of making an effective contribution to repairing the damages in the contribution career that motherhood and subsequent upbringing have historically caused”, according to what they have stated in a statement.