Applying for maternity/paternity leave

We finally completed our application for maternity and paternity leave. The process is a bit complicated because the government pays you directly vs your company, so you act as the middle-man, shuffling documents between your company and social security.

Step one is to get your company to prepare a document saying how much you make and when you want to take your leave. Note that this amount will be capped by the social security maximum, which is about 4000 euros a month.

Once you have this, you make an appointment (cita previa) at the social security office in Sabadell on Tres Creus. Only one person needs to go. You can apply for both maternity and paternity leave on the same document.

Make sure you have:

• Your passport/DNI
• Your NIE (the card or sheet of paper)
• Document supporting your tax rate (eg the 24% authorization)
• Medical “baja” certificate for mother
• Libro Familia
• Filled out form
• Familia numerosa card if you are applying for the extra days of paternity leave due to 3 or more children

The Familia numerosa issue nearly tripped me up, since the card hasn’t arrived yet. I had a copy of the application that I had submitted to the Generalitat, but even that wasn’t good enough. I put on my best sad puppy dog expression and eventually he had mercy on me and talked to his supervisor. They were finally willing to accept a copy of the Libro Familia as evidence of three kids.

I’m understanding more about what election candidates mean with a “one-window” policy, which means that you should be able to go to your town hall and submit all this crap in a single location, as opposed acting like a gopher run between various government agencies in various towns.

I think my experience playing computer adventure games in the 80s and 90s prepared me well for navigating the bureaucracy. It’s all about having the right items in your inventory and collecting and submitting the right pieces of paper in the right order.

The PPC’s “integration contract” for immigrants to Catalunya

PPC’s (Partit Popular de Catalunya) mission to get the xenophobic vote in Catalunya continues with their dumb latest idea, which is a contract that immigrants would sign before immigrating.

It commits them to pay their taxes, learn Catalan and most importantly, go “home” if they lose their jobs. So exactly why should immigrants have an obligation to pay unemployment taxes?

But wait, the stupidity does not stop there. The president of the PPC continued:

“With nearly 20% of unemployment, we cannot maintain the same immigration policy that when we had 8% of workers without jobs. With the crisis we are forced to take action and fix immigration, where one in five unemployed is an immigrant.”

Okay everyone, what’s one in five? 20%.

So basically immigrants have the same unemployment rate as the rest of Spain.

Moving to Spain for work from the US or Canada

If you are planning on moving to Spain for work, and you can’t dig up (figuratively speaking that is) some European ancestor that you can claim EU citizenship through, here’s a couple tips:

• Reexamine your family tree. Perhaps you were lucky enough to have an Italian ancestor. Italy is notoriously lax about their requirements of getting an Italian passport due to blood relations. People don’t normally move to Spain from non-EU, non-Hispanic countries, so you will be the weird exception.
• Are you really sure you can’t get a European passport?
• Get all the paperwork done at the consulate in your home country before you start packing. I know everyone gets excited to move to Spain, but the problem is, the process is designed to work for people who are not yet in Spain. You will find yourself living as a tourist for months and flying back to North America multiple times due to various missing pieces of paperwork if you jump the gun.
• If you are moving from Canada, remember that Canada is not in the Hague Convention. This means that the only way to get a document such as a marriage certificate or birth certificate recognized by Spain is by having the Spanish consulate in Canada do the certification. This will require you to go in person and may take months.
• You will have to get a criminal records check in your home country. This can take time. Make sure that you confirm with the Spanish consulate exactly what kind of report they need.
• Expect multiple trips to the Spanish consulate. Once in a (long) while you luck out and they are super efficient, other times it can take months to get an answer out of them.
• If you have you kids, you can get away with not having a visa for them. We never bothered to get any kind of permits for our kids for the first two years we were here. The visa is actually not really good for anything other than not getting hassled with you enter or leave (sometimes they check for a stamp on exit) the country.
• If your company is moving you, get them to get you a real lawyer with experience moving people from North America. If you work for a multinational, expect the HR department in Spain to be totally incompetent. Don’t expect them to complete any paperwork on time or give you any kind of useful or correct advise.
• Many companies will not ship your container until your visa is approved. This means that if you pack your stuff before you get your visa, it could be sitting on the dock for months until your paperwork is done.
• Think about not selling your car if you have a nice one and some extra container space. Cars are expensive here due to high taxes and if you are willing to make the required tail-light modifications you could save a lot of money.
• Get the Spanish consulate in you home country to make you a “Libro de Familia”, together with Spanish version of your marriage certificate and birth certificates. You will need these later.

The bottom line is: stay in your home country until you have all the paperwork done at the consulate.

Large family discounts for water usage

Did you know that if you have five or more people registered at your address, you can get a ~10% discount on your water bill? Well, you do now. Just head over to the friendly Sorea office near Torreblanca and they will help you out.

It doesn’t really matter who is registered, as long as they can phone and check the headcount with the townhall. Even if it’s your illegal South American housekeeper. Or you could get your friends from the US to empadronamiento at your place when they are visiting.