Skyrocketing prices and 40% of Catalans with frozen wages

by time news

Four out of 10 Catalan workers have had their wages frozen for at least a year. The price of the shopping basket goes up -13% in the last year-, the mortgage goes up -for those who have it at a variable rate-, gasoline goes up, but what doesn’t go up for 1.2 million Catalan wage earners is the salary. And it is that the collective bargaining tables between employers and unions have been bogged down since the beginning of the pandemic and this year, with skyrocketing prices, they have barely made any progress. This is on the way to certifying an ‘annus horribilis’ for the purchasing power of working households.

The absence of an agreement means that the pockets of almost half of the Catalan working population will suffer directly from the bite of inflation on purchasing power. And those salaries that do rise, do so far below prices. Faced with this, CCOO and UGT are finalizing a large demonstration in Madrid that gives the start to a cascade of sectoral mobilizations to try to drag the employers to agreements.

A total of 77 agreements, whether provincial, regional or state, are blocked in Catalan territory and affect 1.2 million workers, with a slightly higher incidence among women than among men, according to data compiled by CCOO. From the metal of Barcelona – one of the agreements with the most weight in all of Spain – to that of temporary work companies (ETT), passing through the bread industries in Girona or the wood and cork of Lleida.

“The purchasing power lost this year will not be recovered, no matter what happens”

Javier Pacheco – General Secretary of CCOO in Catalonia


“The purchasing power lost this year will not be recovered, no matter what happens”, acknowledged the general secretary of CCOO of Catalonia, Javier Pacheco, in a meeting this past week with journalists. Expiring agreements continue to rise and add to the long list of blocked negotiations. Next year it is planned that 113 more agreements will be added, affecting 750,000 more employees.

Sectors in latent conflict pile up and, for now, the domes of CEOE, CCOO and UGT cannot find a date to meet again to resolve the situation. Sources from the three entities confirm to El Periódico, from the same editorial group as this newspaper, that there are informal talks to try to reactivate the salary agreement negotiations that broke down last May. But, at the moment, these contacts do not crystallize into a formal call with a date and time. The call for elections this November at the CEOE makes great progress difficult, despite the fact that publicly there are business sectors – such as Foment del Treball – that urge the tables to be reunited.

The dispute over whether or not to include pay review clauses is key to the negotiations for the pay deal. “It is very important that the negotiations are reactivated, otherwise the conflict is served. Neither companies can agree to increase wages to the level of the CPI, nor can they offer increases of 1 or 2%”, affirmed the director of labor relations of Foment del Treball, Javier Ibars. At the moment, the few agreements that are renewed are signed at an average of 2.6%, an increase 42% lower than what salaries are rising in the rest of Europe.

The biggest loss of purchasing power in recent decades is already having its first effects on household savings rates. According to the latest data from the INE, referring to the first quarter and which give a still incipient view of the impact of inflation, the savings rate is at its lowest level since 2019. In other words, all the savings forced during the pandemic have already disappeared.

Meanwhile, the tables explore “imaginative solutions”, an adjective shared by employers’ and unions’ negotiators. “We are offering improvements in conciliation or permits, also the commitment not to absorb or compensate surpluses with wage increases… Even in some agreements we are studying some type of limited and partial indexation”, explained Ibars. “In the company agreements, where we know whether the companies are making money or not, we are making more progress, but in the sectoral ones it is being impossible”, pointed out the Secretary of Trade Union Policy of UGT de Catalunya, Núria Gilgado.

warm autumn

The central they threaten to break the social peace that has reigned until now and begin to escalate the conflict from the end of September or the beginning of October. “We will not be the pagans of this crisis, […] the corporate irresponsibility is enormous and it is they, with their profits, who have caused this second round of price inflation,” declared Pacheco.

Milk today is 25.6% more expensive than a year ago; oil 24%; eggs 22.4%, bread 15.2%… The largest increase in the shopping basket in four decades comes with relatively low levels of labor conflict. Until May, last data recorded by the Department of Labor and just the month in which negotiations between employers and unions for a salary agreement broke down, there had been a total of 50 strikes in Catalonia, in which 34,058 workers had participated and in which a total of 825,009 working hours had been lost.

The level of incidence of stoppages was 10.7%, that is to say, of 100 workers called to the protests, only 10.7 had supported them. It is the second lowest level of incidence in the last five years in Catalonia and is far from the levels of conflict arising from the 2008 crisis. However, CCOO and UGT are making final moves to reverse these data and shake up the street this fall.

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