MADRID, 19 Dic. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The second vice president and Minister of Labor and Social Economy, Yolanda Díaz, will participate this Monday in the presentation of the report prepared by the Advisory Commission of the interprofessional minimum wage (SMI) to determine the increase that this minimum income should experience in 2023 in order to reach the commitment to place it at 60% of the average salary at the end of the legislature.
Díaz will attend the presentation of this report together with the coordinator of this group of experts, Inmaculada Cebrián, professor of Fundamentals of Economic Analysis in the Department of Economics at the University of Alcalá de Henares (Madrid).
After the presentation of this report, the Ministry of Labor will convene the social agents to try to reach an agreement on the rise of the SMI for 2023.
Although such an agreement is not mandatory, since the Government is only obliged to consult them, Díaz will try to find an agreement with unions and businessmen, as he did on previous occasions. The last two times, when the SMI rose from 950 to 965 euros per month and from 965 to the current 1,000 euros, it only got the ‘yes’ from the CCOO and UGT, since CEOE and Cepyme dropped both agreements.
The last agreement signed between the Government and the unions, valid for 2022, sets the SMI at 1,000 euros gross per month in 14 payments. Looking ahead to 2023 and after a year marked by high levels of inflation, the CCOO and UGT are demanding to raise it to at least 1,080 euros, which would be equivalent to a relative increase of 8%.
The unions thus want to protect from the loss of purchasing power the almost two million workers who are directly affected by the SMI, especially women, youth and immigrants.
The group of experts, as it did on the previous occasion, will establish a possible range for the rise of the SMI after their assessments of the average salary, but the CCOO and UGT have already warned that they will not accept increases of 3%, which lead to this minimum income. at about 1,030 euros. His claim is clear: the SMI must rise in line with what pensions have risen.
The negotiation with the social agents is not easy, since CEOE and Cepyme are not in the business of supporting an increase in the SMI. In fact, Cepyme warned last week that the increases in the SMI approved by the Government since 2018 have caused the disappearance of a total of 217,500 jobs.
In fact, the SME employers specified in a report that the 35.9% increase experienced by the SMI from 2018, from the 735.9 euros per month then to the current 1,000 euros, has generated the destruction of 71,600 jobs and avoided the creation of 145,900 jobs.
UGT, for its part, replied with another report from the Autonomous University of Madrid in which it is indicated that since 2018, when the increases in the interprofessional minimum wage began, more than 1.3 million jobs have been created in Spain. worked.
