The Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration will create at the end of February the observatory to evaluate the benefit for cessation of activity, the “unemployment” aimed at self-employed workers who see their income flow interrupted due to having to close their business. or due to circumstances derived from temporality. This was announced by the head of the portfolio, Elma Saiz, at the informative breakfast organized this Thursday by Europa Press. “The implementation was the achievement of a demand, that the self-employed could contribute to be able to have coverage and after a few years of that implementation, the policies must be evaluated to see if what has been implemented works well or bad,” he explained.
The Government thus complies with the provisions of the General Social Security Law, in one of the additional provisions in which April 1, 2023 was marked as the deadline for its implementation, so the Saiz department will reach This milestone ten months late. Precisely, this was the reproach launched by the Union of Associations of Self-Employed Workers and Entrepreneurs (UATAE) a week ago, in a note through which it urged the Ministry to establish this observatory “as soon as possible”, as a prior step to undertaking the actions that they deem appropriate to carry out to strengthen the protection of self-employed workers.
The head of Social Security has guaranteed that this ‘examination’ will be carried out by the social agents, although he has not set a specific date to convene the autonomous work table. This is an important step for the associations, but both ATA, UPTA and UATAE also want monitoring of the transition to the new contribution system based on real income, the product of the reform of the Special Regime for Self-Employed Workers (RETA). . , as well as opening a way for self-employed workers to also access the unemployment benefit that is currently the subject of negotiation between CEOE, UGT and CCOO and the Ministry of Labor.
This lawsuit has already been presented by the Association of Self-Employed Workers (ATA) which is integrated into CEOE, as La Información announced in December. The Executive then limited itself to asking employers and unions to comment on the draft of the subsidy reform that the departments of Yolanda Díaz and Nadia Calviño worked around the clock, however, they did not receive a response to this demand nor was it studied in Depth, according to employer sources. However, this association understands it as “logical” that the change in model that attempts to equate the two work models is also accompanied by an increase in the protection of the self-employed once they have exhausted the contributory benefit.
The benefit aimed at self-employed workers has a maximum coverage of two years, in the event that they have contributed the four years prior to cessation of activity, and only four months if the contribution period is between one year and 17 months; as reflected in Royal Decree-Law 13/2022, of July 26. It was created in 2010, but it was not until the criteria were made more flexible that access was truly opened to all self-employed workers. In this sense, the last rule introduced the compatibility of the benefit with the activity in certain cases and the obligation to pay 0.9% of your contribution base as contribution base from January 1, 2023, which before of this regulation was voluntary.
