A lifetime outside Social Security: "I am 69 and I am obliged to continue working"

A 69-year-old woman in Spain, Elva Villacis, has spent her life working outside the country’s social security system. She arrived in Spain during the era of the peseta and has been cleaning homes and caring for elderly people for over three decades. Four years ago, she reached retirement age, but she continues to work because she lacks the required number of contribution years to qualify for a contributory pension. Despite having a university education from Ecuador, many women of her generation faced long periods without contracts and outside the social security net. Villacis recalls how domestic employment was often conducted without contracts or contributions, a reality that now prevents her from retiring. “Now I am 69 years old and have to keep working,” she told El Mundo. “I gave my life, just like many of my colleagues. This isn’t our fault, it's the result of decades of a system that allowed black-market work, lack of contracts, and employers who didn't register us with the social security.” Her story is far from unique. According to data from Oxfam Intermón, the precariousness that follows these domestic workers throughout their careers also affects them in old age. A recent report identified a “triangle of precarity” marked by informality, temporary contracts, and part-time work, which hampers their contribution records and explains why thousands of women face old age with insufficient pensions or no benefits at all. In Spain, 565,718 people work in domestic roles and caregiving, according to the Intermón document. Of these, 87 percent are women, and 69 percent hold foreign or dual nationality, making this one of the most gendered sectors with high migrant presence. Additionally, 158,330 of these workers are over 55 years old, with three in ten living in poverty and around 70,000 working in administrative irregularity. Precarious conditions extend beyond the underground economy. Among those over 55, 15.7 percent remain without social security registration, 24 percent have temporary contracts, and 62 percent work part-time, conditions that make it difficult to accumulate stable contribution records and complicate access to contributory pensions. Nerea Boneta, one of the authors of the report, says the precarity begins well before retirement. “The law on foreigners allows and favors people working without rights,” she explained to the newspaper. As a consequence, “if you’ve worked many years without a contract, even if you enter the formal market later, those gaps end up penalizing your retirement, both in terms of years and the amount of the pension.” Fragmented career paths directly affect retirement prospects. The report states that 65.9 percent of domestic workers over 55 expect to delay their retirement beyond the legal age because they don’t meet the required contribution years to qualify for a contributory pension or need to continue earning income to cover monthly expenses. Rossana Cantero knows this path well. She came from Paraguay 18 years ago and spent the first 12 working without a contract while waiting to regularize her administrative status. Securing the necessary documents eased some uncertainty but did not change her working conditions significantly. “It stabilized a little, but not much,” she summarized. She still alternates between periods of work without contracts and jobs where she contributes fewer hours than she actually works. “I have only contributed six hours so far,” she explained. “I don’t contribute the eight hours I should.” As a single mother, she assumes this situation will delay her retirement: “Probably I’ll have to work more years than needed to get a pension.” She added that “if I were to stop working due to illness or anything else, I would have a very low pension.” The physical and emotional toll of unstable work is immense. The instability doesn’t just impact financial security but also takes a heavy toll on health and mental wellbeing. Many of these women face chronic stress, exhaustion, and limited access to healthcare, further compounding their vulnerability in old age. Their stories highlight a systemic issue that has affected generations of female domestic workers, leaving them trapped in cycles of economic insecurity and social exclusion.