Patronal and unions have reached an agreement in principle to raise the wages upload at least one 10% cumulatively for the next three years. The social agents have managed to close an agreement, after weeks of discreet negotiations, which they will transfer to their sectors and guide collective bargaining until 2025. The agreement contemplates increases in the 4% for this 2023 and 3% for 2024 and 2025, respectively, as the Ser chain has advanced and EL PERIÓDICO has been able to confirm from various sources of the negotiation.
Said agreement, which must be ratified by the highest management bodies of the social agents next week, incorporates an additional increase of 1%, depending on the evolution of the CPI. According to sources familiar with the ins and outs, if the CPI closes this year above 4%, salaries must rise 5%. And if in 2024 and in 2025 the CPI closes above 4%, they should rise by 4%.
The CEOE, CCOO and UGT have sealed the bases of the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC), a kind of ‘agreement of agreements’ that later serves as a reference in each sector to agree on salary increases. The percentages of increases agreed they are not obligatorybut they serve as a reference and all signatory organizations agree to apply them.
According to the current inflation scales (4.1% in April) and if the agreement is fulfilled by sector, the bases agreed between the social agents would allow safeguarding the purchasing power from the workers. Although these come from a severe devaluation of real wages during 2022, the largest in four decades. The agreed content does not include retroactive formulas, according to detailed sources of the negotiation.
How does the AENC work? For example, from now on when employers and unions sit down to agree on the office and office agreement of the province of Barcelona, a statement that has been stuck for months and that directly affects the payrolls of some 200,000 people, the two parties agree to apply a 4% salary increase for this year. It is not required by law and both parties can agree to higher or lower increases, but this figure serves as a reference in case of disagreement.
The second time’s the charm
On May 5, 2022, the social agents considered the negotiations broken due to the impossibility of reaching an agreement satisfactory to both parties and that their sectors could comply. Coincidence or not, on May 5, 2023, those same actors managed to sign a principle of agreement on wages. The AENC has been fallow for an exact year and the agreements that have been renewed during those 365 days have obeyed the correlation of forces of each sector. In those where the unions had more muscle, wage increases have been higher and in those where they are barely organized, lower.
Employers and unions manage to agree on a framework of stability in their relations and thus deactivate the threat of a ‘hot autumn‘ that the centrals had staged in this recent First of May. The Government has also been demanding a salary agreement from the social agents for months, to avoid introducing an economic destabilizer in the current context of high uncertainty, motivated by the attempt to banking crisisthe prices that do not remit and the war in Ukraine.
What have the parties compromised on?
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The agreement comes after resignations by both parties. The CEOE rejected any linking wages to inflation, which caused the negotiating table to break down last year. And now he agrees to assume an additional point each year of salary increases depending on how much the CPI rises, which will force companies to provision funds in case prices rise more than agreed. The businessmen are convened on Monday in an extraordinary meeting to give the final approval to the agreement.
And the trade union party has significantly moderated its positions. His first red line was that all the agreements had a salary review clause, that is, regardless of the amount of base increase that they agreed upon, at the end of the year the companies had to equate salaries to prices. From there they moved to a mixed proposal, in which additional increases depended partly on prices and partly on prices. benefits of each sector. And they have ended up accepting a partial review clause, which promises an increase of up to 1% depending on how the CPI ends.