The activity bonus makes the difference in Flor Rumenova’s payroll. Depending on the billing of the cafeteria where he works in Pozuelo, a town close to Madrid and which usually appears in the ranking of the richest towns in Spain, he has an extra that is added to his meager salary and allows him to breathe.
She lives with her husband, paying between the two of them a rent of 800 euros. “On the normal salary I can’t live, and what I do is some extra work somewhere else on my days off. And then I make it to the end of the month without any problem and even allowing myself a little caprice”, says Flor, a 34-year-old Bulgarian who arrived in Spain in 2017, with her real name Tsevetomila (flourishing in Russian), but who has verified that this word is complicated. to pronounce for the Spanish.
“We would like to get into a mortgage, but now it is impossible,” adds Flor, who shares work with five other waiters and three cooks in the cafeteria, some Spanish, others not. She does not seem particularly enthusiastic about the rise in the interprofessional minimum wage (SMI) to 1,080 euros. “It is very little noticeable, with what life has gone up in general… it is not going to fix my life”, she comments, although she acknowledges other measures that have been noticed, such as the reduction in the public transport subscription.
Flor Rumenova has taken professional training courses in early childhood education in Spain and last year she was a monitor in a school, but it was only three hours. She has also followed a course to take care of children with disabilities. She finally made the leap to the hotel business, where she has a contract of 30 hours a week, with a working day that can vary, but this season starts at 7 pm.
It is part of the more than 2.3 million wage earners who will benefit from the increase in the SMI this year. The robot portrait of the main recipient of this minimum wage is that of “a woman, between the ages of 16 and 34, with a temporary contract who works in the service sector or in agriculture, and who lives in Andalusia”. Data from a CC.OO. show how the increase benefits young people more intensely. If the incidence in the total salaried population is 13.7%, it is multiplied in the case of young people, with an incidence of 31.7% in the 16-24 age group and 19.2% in the from 25 to 34 years.
By sectors, it is in agriculture where the increase will have the greatest impact, since it will affect almost half of the salaried population; followed by services, with an incidence of 14.5%. It is much smaller in industry and practically nil in construction.
Another significant element is territorial distribution. The impact of the rise will be especially noticeable in Andalusia, where it affects 19% of wage earners, the Canary Islands, Murcia and Extremadura. If these four communities are added, it represents 36% of the total beneficiaries of the increase. In percentage terms, the incidence is lower in Madrid and Catalonia, with figures above 10%, although in total number of recipients of the SMI, the two together add up to more than half a million wage earners.
The increase in the SMI is a factor that will make it possible to reduce the general gap between genders, because there are many more women who receive this remuneration, both in total numbers and as a percentage. Of the full-time wage earners who receive the SMI, there are more than one million one hundred thousand women, which represents an incidence of 18.2%; while the number of men remains at eight hundred thousand, with a percentage of 10.3%.
