The bank will advance the half-board bonus to some 22,000 industry retirees who were excluded from the measure last October, according to the principle of agreement between credit institutions, unions and the Ministry of Finance, Money Vivo knows. The government will then compensate the banks and fully pay the cost of the pension supplement through a proposal for a regulation that will be put to a vote in parliament. Granting half-pension to bank pensioners costs the state treasury between 30 and 35 million euros.
It should be recalled that in December Finance Minister Fernando Medina acknowledged the injustice of the state in discriminating against pensioners in the bank, who receive their pension through private pension funds or mixed systems. At the time, the official justified the government’s reversal of position by acknowledging that the extraordinary support given to all Social Security retirees and Caixa Geral de Aposentação came from the state budget and not from the Social Security. “The nature of the support became non-contributory” because it came from “a transfer from the state budget, it came from the general tax revenue and not from the social security system,” Medina said on Dec. 30, 2022.
Now the sector’s unions, affiliated with UGT, announce that “retired bank employees will receive half the pension intended to mitigate the effects of inflation, thanks to a proposal from the MAIS Union of the Financial Sector, the Sindicato dos Bancários do Centro (SBC) and the Northern Bankers’ Union (SBN), which resulted in a tripartite agreement with credit institutions and the government, which will be signed in a few days,” said a statement released to the press on Wednesday.
Check of 125 euros will be deducted from the amount to be paid
The president of MAIS Sindicato, António Fonseca, explained to DV that pensioners who received a check for 125 euros, intended for employees with a gross monthly income of up to 2,700 euros, beneficiaries of social assistance and those registered with employment offices, will be deducted that value at the time of payment of the pension supplement. “The 125 euros will be deducted from the half-pension of these pensioners,” the union leader assured.
The €125 check was the alternative the government found last year to compensate tens of thousands of bank pensioners who were not entitled to a half-board check or because they have been allocated to private pension funds or to hybrid systems in which only a small part of the pension comes from social security and most of it comes from banking. This solution was the result, in September last year, of meetings between the trade unions and the Ministry of Labour, led by Ana Mendes Godinho. Despite a wave of protests from banking reformers, the government eventually backed down.
Salomé Pinto is a journalist for Dinheiro Vivo
Source: DN
