The forcefulness of the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, flatly refusing to review the prices of public contracts due to the increase in the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI), sat very badly with the CEOE. The minister’s statement that “the increase in the SMI cannot be at the expense of the collection of all Spaniards” was seen by the employers as another negative in a demand for which they have been fighting for six years, and in this case , with the support of the unions, but which continues to crash due to the inflexibility of the Treasury. And Montero is not alone. In Economics they also give him support.
“We are not going to bend our arm,” Juan Díez de los Ríos, the president of both the cleaning association, Aspel, and the Commission for Intensive Personnel Services of the CEOE, tells La Vanguardia, which he considers has the support global employers’ association to demand that the increase in the SMI for 2024 be accompanied by changes in the law that prevents indexing costs in contracts signed with the public administration. A regulation approved during the Government of Mariano Rajoy, but with which the socialist Ministry of Finance feels very comfortable.
“Now that Yolanda Díaz is open to considering it, Montero appears and rejects it,” says Díez de los Ríos, who adds that “when we make these proposals it hurts us to be pointed out as bad businessmen who do not want to raise salaries.”
The problem of deindexation especially affects companies in which labor represents a very high percentage of expenses, such as cleaning, private security, and home care, among many others. In total, companies that maintain contracts with the public administration have 1.5 million workers, and the cost of labor represents practically 60% of total expenses, so any increase in the SMI has a considerable impact on them. . Their complaint is that the current regulations prevent them from transferring this increase to the administration that pays them, be it the State, the autonomies or the city councils.
The sector’s calculations are that a 3.5% increase in salaries would mean a total extra cost of 359 million euros in the second half of this year, of which, if they could be transferred to the administration, 84% ( 302 million) would be supported by the autonomous communities and city councils, and the remaining 16% (57 million) by the general administration of the State. That is to say, in one year it would be an increase of about 718 million euros, which would have to be assumed by the companies and which they claim to be able to transfer it to the administration. The figure would be somewhat higher if the 4% increase proposed by the Ministry of Labor is established.
There are cases in which the impact is especially notable, such as in cleaning, where half a million workers are employed and labor accounts for 88% of total expenses. A salary increase of 3.5% means about 100 million a year in additional expenses. They are followed by private security, with 85% of the total costs dependent on salaries, which would add an extra 22 million annually, and urban sanitation, which employs 110,000 workers and where salaries represent 60% of the total cost, which It represents an extra cost of 114 million annually. A very specific case is the home care service, with 74,000 workers and where the total cost depends 90% on salaries.
This indexation of contracts is the great obstacle that threatens to prevent the agreement to increase the SMI, with a Government in which, here, too, there are different positions between Labor and the Treasury.