The salary level reaches historic highs, but it is increasingly costing more effort to fill the shopping cart: if last year the wages of workers rose an average of 4.6%, the runaway rise in prices lowered the real purchasing power to levels similar to 1996, according to the Adecco Monitor of Opportunities and Job Satisfaction.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, the average Spanish salary stood at 1,823 euros per month. However, the average remuneration of workers has lost 0.7% of purchasing power in the last two years, which is equivalent to 157 euros. The impact of inflation is greater than that of the fact that more than three million wage earners received 30% less than their salary for being in ERTE” at the height of the pandemic, they say from the human resources company.
The data is worrying because, as Javier Blasco, director of The Adecco Group Institute, points out, the remuneration level in Spain is “medium-low”. To this is added, he adds, that the upward trend in wages in recent decades “has been really low” and that there are companies and sectors that cannot increase them by 7% or 10% to counteract the effect of inflation without that affects your income statement.
Despite this, at the end of 2022, the average salary reached its highest historical level in all the autonomous communities. Madrid, which leads the ranking, registered an average gross salary of 2,135 euros, with a year-on-year increase of 2.8%, followed by the Basque Country and Navarra. In the case of Catalonia, which occupies the fourth position, the average salary stood at 1,958 euros, with an annual growth of 4.9%.
In contrast, Extremadura, the Canary Islands and Murcia are the communities with the lowest salaries in Spain. In the case of the first, it does not even reach 1,500 euros per month, despite registering a year-on-year increase of 4.8%. While the Canary Islands was the community with the most significant increase -11.1%-, although the average salary stood at 1,573 euros in the last quarter of last year.
The areas of Spain where it is charged the most have in common, Blasco indicates, either that “they are heavily industrialized, as is the case of Navarra, the Basque Country and some Catalan regions”, or that they are metropolitan areas -such as Barcelona and Madrid- , where the headquarters of large companies, banks, insurers and the technology sector are located. “The industry has historically paid high wages,” he argues, especially metallurgical, automotive, as well as chemical and pharmaceutical. In contrast, the communities with the lowest salaries share the fact of having a greater weight in the agricultural sector, as occurs in Extremadura, the Canary Islands, Murcia and Andalusia.
Precisely because of these salary inequalities in the different regions of the country, the impact of inflation and its repercussion on purchasing power is different in each of them. Thus, while the purchasing power of the average salary has increased in the last two years in four communities -Canary Islands, the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and the Valencian Community-, it has fallen in the rest, according to the study, whose publication coincides with a time when employers and unions are immersed in a negotiation to increase labor remunerations.