Integration of contribution gaps and occasional part-time work. Constitution and law: accidental part-time work and reduction of contributory pensions for permanent disability and retirement. ATS [Order of the Supreme Court] 5280/2012. Supreme Court. Labour Court. Court order dated 26 April 2012. Judge: Aurelio Desdentado Bonete

Abstract

The Order of the Labour Court of the Supreme Court, constituted as the General Court, dated April 26, 2012, raised a matter of unconstitutionality to the Constitutional Court regarding the regulation contained in section b) of rule 3 of number 1 of the seventh additional provision of the General Social Security Act of 1994, amended by Royal Decree-Law 15/1998, for possible violation of articles 9.3 and 14 CE [Spanish Constitution]. Its speaker was Magistrate Aurelio Desdentado Bonete. The integration of the contribution gaps with the minimum contribution bases for part-time work, when the gap opened after a job of this nature, but occasional and forced by the lack of full-time hiring, in the case of workers whose professional life had been predominantly full time, caused the fictitious termination at the time of the criterion reducing partiality, with the effect of reducing unjustifiably, disproportionately and randomly, and therefore arbitrarily, the regulatory bases of contributory pensions of permanent disability derived from common illness and retirement of workers affected by the aforementioned legal regulation. The contested legal regulation could violate the fundamental right to normative equality of full-time workers. In addition, despite its neutrality, the legal regulation could constitute an assumption of indirect gender discrimination and violate female part-time workers' fundamental right to not suffer discrimination, the majority against men.