The Council of Ministers will approve this morning the increase in the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI) to 1,080 euros in 14 payments with retroactive effect from January 1. It is the consummation of the agreement reached by the Government and the unions two weeks ago with the employers strongly against it. It is not only that the CEOE does not accept the rise, but that it did not even attend the meeting, in another example of the bad relations it maintains with the Ministry of Labor.
In this way, the Government meets its objective of placing the SMI in 2023 at 60% of the average salary. A commitment that was included in the program of the government coalition and that has led to a successive series of increases until placing the SMI from 735 euros in 2018 to 1,080 in 2023. The 8% increase in the minimum wage this last year is below of the rise that most European countries have adopted in 2023 to deal with inflation. However, if the last five years are examined, the situation is different. The 47% increase in the SMI in Spain is the largest among the large countries of the European Union, above Germany and France, for example.
The 8% increase in 2023 is located in the upper band of the fork drawn by the commission of experts, whose mission was to set the equivalent of 60% of the average salary in precise euros. They established a margin of between 1,046 and 1,082 euros that served as the baseline for the negotiations. The final result, 1,080 euros, is very close to the demands of the unions, although they came to claim up to 1,100 euros, and on the other hand, it is very far from what the CEOE accepted. The employers proposed an increase up to 1,040 euros and with two added conditions, that the situation of the field and the indexing of companies in public procurement be reviewed.
The second vice president and labor minister, Yolanda Díaz, and the general secretaries of CC.OO., Unai Sordo, and UGT, Pepe Álvarez, participated in the decisive meeting on January 31; although they gave the prominence of the announcement to the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, who made it during a speech in the Senate.
Once the decision was known, CEOE sources indicated that "the increase proposed by the Government in practice represents an abrupt interference in collective bargaining." His argument is that although a large part of the workers are covered by collective bargaining and the vast majority of the salaries set in the agreements exceed the SMI, the increase in the minimum wage "has an impact on the salary bases and drags down the rest of the tables" .
In this way, the increase in the SMI becomes one more clash between the Government and employers. The times of consensus are far away, especially in the pandemic stage, in which three-party agreements multiplied. Since the approval of the labor reform, which was achieved by consensus, the CEOE has distanced itself more and more from the initiatives of the Government.
There is also no progress in the bilateral negotiations between employers and unions, such as the renewal of the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC), which has been bogged down for more than half a year. Initially, it was the salary guarantee clauses demanded by the unions that prompted the rejection of the CEOE. In recent months there has been no movement and there has been no response to the latest initiative of the CC.OO., to propose modeling salary increases based on the situation of the companies; an approach that is part of the usual demands of the employer.
