The offensive of the second vice president and Minister of Labor, Yolanda Díaz, continues to denounce the high salaries of senior executives, comparing them with the remuneration of the workers they manage. If on Wednesday, when signing the agreement to increase the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI), he already claimed to open this debate, this morning he pointed out one of the possible formulas to achieve it. It could be done through a higher tax burden.
“There are possibilities, also fiscal ones” to address this issue, Díaz said. He began by pointing out that there are different modulations to deal with it and that one could come with an agreement, but another would be to act through taxes on the salaries of managers, although he has not given more details.
To justify the debate, the vice president has used two salary comparisons. On the one hand, that “the executive presidents of the Ibex 35 in our country have approximate salaries that are 174 times more” than those of their workers; and on the other hand, the executive directors of these companies, not the presidents, receive a remuneration that multiplies by 54 the average salary of their companies.
The vice president’s thesis is that after so much debate about the increase in the SMI, we must also talk about maximum salaries and highlight the difference between the remuneration of senior managers and workers.
These are words that already yesterday led the president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, to affirm that Díaz’s suggestion to intervene in business compensation is typical of a “banana republic.” One more episode of the upward confrontation between Díaz and Garamendi, which already had an episode with the employers distancing themselves from the 5% increase in the SMI, which only the Government and unions have signed, and which continues with the discussion on the salaries of the managers . For the president of the businessmen, these public positions of the Ministry of Labor cause a lack of confidence and can jeopardize the arrival of investments.
