Even collective
bargaining agreements reflect the process of the loss of purchasing power
through salary devaluation that Spanish workers have been suffering from two
years now: a growing number of them accept that wages are not going to rise,
and in some cases that they will even fall.
According to Labor
Ministry figures, out of 4.2 million employees covered by agreements that were
registered to October, 1.27 million of them have accepted a 0-percent wage
variation. Another 13,142 people said yes to an agreement that reduces their
salaries over the coming years, with an average contraction of 3.3 percent.
Overall, workers who accept a wage freeze or reduction already represent over
30 percent of people protected by a collective bargaining agreement.
Collective bargaining gained some traction again in the last three
months, but the pace is still a lot slower than in previous years.
“There are millions of
people who are losing that protection,” said Ignacio Fernández Toxo, secretary
general of the CCOO union.
Apart from high
unemployment of around 29 percent of the workforce, most
observers agree that the conservative Popular Party government's labor reform
has also played a role in cutting salaries.
Meanwhile, the vast
majority of employees under collective bargaining agreements registered this
year will have salary increases of less than one percent. The average increase,
according to the Labor Ministry, has barely changed in the last three months:
in October it was 0.55 percent, a one hundredth of a point less than September.
There are other
statistics that reflect the wage devaluation more clearly: pay per employee, calculated
from national accounting, has been dropping for nearly two years. And these
bargaining agreements reflect neither the wage freeze for civil servants nor
the loss of income for self-employed workers.
“If you add it all up, wage growth is flat or even negative,” the
president of the CEOE employers’ association, Juan Rosell, said last month.
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