Everything is now ready to start negotiations to raise the Minimum Professional Wage. The experts’ report will be ready this week and the Ministry of Labor will convene a meeting with the social agents for the next week to decide the level to which the SMI should increase in 2023. In fact, the Government has already set the target, and for a long time time: 60% of the average salary. What remains is to translate this percentage into euros.
In this sense, the reports of the commission of experts, made up of academics, members of the Government and union representatives, will mark the basis on which to work. They began their work in September with the clear objective of updating their previous calculations, which translated 60% of the average salary for 2023 into a range between 1,011 and 1,049 euros. It was an analysis based on salaries from 2018, and now it is updated with the data from 2022, and also taking into account the skyrocketing inflation that has taken place throughout this year. What at Work they take for granted is that the lower part of the range proposed by the experts will be above 1,049 euros. In addition, these same sources suggest that the projection of salaries for 2023 will have to be added to these data, which is the year in which this increase will be applied.
Regarding this increase, the Second Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, considers that she has the support of the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez.
Labor will have the conclusions of the experts to raise the increase for next year, in a negotiation in which the unions seem well disposed, although they claim an increase in the SMI from the current 1,000 euros to 1,100, while the CEOE is very in against. In employers, the successive increases in the SMI in recent years stand out, going from 735 euros in 2019 to 1,000 this year and they allege that companies cannot bear more charges.
It is true that there is a change in the scenario, that Antonio Garamendi has been re-elected, with which there are no longer electoral conditions in his decisions, although he has always denied them; but there is no predisposition to agree on new increases in the SMI. “If they do not protest excessively, it would already be something positive,” say sources from the negotiation.
One of the arguments put forward by the Second Vice President and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, is to take inflation into account when setting the increase in the minimum wage and, in addition, she specifically charged the commission of experts to have Also take into account the Bank of Spain report on the SMI and its impact on poverty and inequality.
To reach their conclusions, the experts have also had reports prepared by economists outside the committee. This is the case of the three works published by La Vanguardia, and which support the rise in the SMI because it reduces both wage and income inequality and poverty, although one of the reports warns of negative effects on job creation. To be precise, he points out that without the increase in the SMI, some 28,000 more jobs would have been created. This is the report prepared by the economist Sara de la Rica, from ISEAK, which concludes that, starting in 2019, when the SMI was increased to 900 euros, in the first months the impact was zero, although after a year it was noticeable. the negative effect on employment, both in the loss of jobs and in the reduction of working hours.
In other aspects, the report highlights positive elements of the increase, such as the reduction of wage inequality and an increase in income among women and foreigners. The other two reports highlight favorable consequences of the increase in the SMI. The one from the University of Alcalá establishes that it made it possible to improve the equity of income distribution and help households that were below the poverty line, while the one from the Complutense University also affirms that it reduced wage inequality, because it allowed improve the situation of women, those under 35 years of age and workers with a low level of training.
