8.3% has led to the recovery of the salary review clause in some collective agreements, raising the proportion of workers with this guarantee from 15.65% to 21.08%.
According to the statistics of collective agreements of the Ministry of Labor, with data at the end of 2022, one in five workers under the umbrella of an agreement has a salary guarantee clause, while in 2021 they were one in six. This clause allows the salary to be revised upwards each year based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to protect your purchasing power. Thus, 1.9 million workers, of the more than 9 million protected by agreements, have this safeguard of purchasing power.
Overall, last year 3,084 collective agreements were registered, of which only 409 (13.26%) have this wage guarantee clause, data that contrasts with those registered at the beginning of the century. In the year 2000, almost half of the 5,252 collective agreements that existed (2,311) had a safeguard clause, which benefited 6 million workers out of the more than 9 that had been covered.
Loss of 5.5 points of purchasing power
According to Labor data, the average salary increase of the registered agreements and of those with economic effects in 2022 was 2.78%, which represents a loss of five and a half points of purchasing power with respect to the average increase of consumer prices (8.3%).
The rise was greater in company agreements (3.22%) than in sectoral agreements (2.75%), which are the ones that prospered the majority of workers (8.4 million). Both the CCOO and the UGT indicate that, if only the agreements renewed in 2022 are taken into account -and not the set of agreements with economic effects that year- the average wage increase agreed would be close to 4%, even 4.3 points below delIPC. In a report on collective bargaining, the CCOO also points out that 48% of the workers whose agreements were signed in 2022 are covered by a salary review clause.
Insufficient raises and compensatory payments
In general terms, the increases agreed throughout the year in collective bargaining have not been automatically indexed to the CPI, as in the construction sector, where a 10% increase has been agreed in stages over three years.
Among the energy companies, Repsol has a framework agreement that guarantees a salary increase of 75% of the CPI, while Iberdrola, which does not contemplate revisions in its agreement, paid an extra payment of 1,000 euros to all its employees in December.
The bank, for its part, reopened its collective agreement (signed in 2021) at the end of November to modify the salary tables for 2023 and for salaries to rise by 4.5% and not the 1.25% initially agreed, although the unions have accused the Banco Santander of not applying said increase.
In the metallurgical sector, the agreements are negotiated by province, although, on average, the agreements agreed in the industry as a whole observed a wage increase of 3.27%.
Deadlock in collective bargaining
The wage guarantee clause was the main stumbling block between employers and unions and the reason why CEOE left the negotiating table for the new agreement for employment and collective bargaining (AENC) in May. The CCOO and UGT unions have been demanding that the employers return to the table ever since to reach an agreement that raises wages and prevents the loss of purchasing power of workers.
The general secretary of CCOO, Unai Sordo, has shown himself this week to negotiate salary review clauses linked in part to the economic evolution of each company or sector, and not only to inflation, in order to facilitate a new agreement for employment and collective bargaining (AENC). For his part, the general secretary of the UGT, Pepe Álvarez, has once again complained to the CEOE, he sits down to negotiate the AENC because raising wages is something “that everyone is asking for: the IMF, the ECB and even the governor of the Bank of Spain.
