Three out of ten employees (including workers in ERTE) and pensioners in Asturias earn less than a thousand euros per month, according to data at the end of 2021 released this week by the Tax Agency. Specifically, there are 167,316 people, which represents 28% of the 596,853 Asturians who receive an income, with the exception of the unemployed. Of those 167,316 citizens who do not reach a thousand euros, 60% are pensioners.
This is a proportion slightly lower than that of Spain as a whole, where four out of ten citizens do not reach mileuristas. The gap is partly due to the fact that Asturias traditionally shows a higher-than-average level of income due to industry and mining pensions, generally higher than those of the common system. Thus, for example, the average salary in Asturias last year was 22,286 euros, compared to 21,519 for the country as a whole. And the regional average pension was estimated at 19,068 euros, 17% more than the Spanish average of 16,236.
However, there are many Asturians who have to live with less than a thousand euros per month. The majority, a total of 81,824 citizens, receive between 9,000 and 12,000 euros gross per year. And of these, the vast majority, 65,814, are pensioners. Next are the employees (12,893) and those regulated by an ERTE (3,117). It should be remembered that the data correspond to 2021, when many of the temporary employment regulation files applied in the first year of the pandemic had already ended.
In the range of 6,000 to 9,000 euros per year, once again pensioners are the majority group, with 16,400 recipients, giving way to 11,656 employees and 2,134 workers in ERTE. In the step that includes 3,000 and 6,000 euros there is a more equal distribution between beneficiaries of a pension (12,381) and a salary (12,133), with a minority of 881 ERTEs. This is not the case in the lowest bracket of the table, which includes those who earn less than 3,000 euros: there are 22,654 employees, 6,902 pensioners and 351 workers in ERTE.
That is to say, if only the 59,336 Asturians with a salary are analyzed (excluding those who are in ERTE), 38%, practically four out of every ten, earned less than 3,000 euros a year; 250 euros per month. A figure that is consistent with recent estimates from the Youth Council, which indicates that three out of ten young people in the region (between 16 and 29 years old) work part-time.
But there are also those in that modality that are not so young. This is the case of Javier (the name with which he asks to be identified, although it is not his), a 40-year-old Asturian who, after working eight months in a post office in Catalonia, has just returned to the region and has only had the option of doing it with a reduced shift. “There is an upward trend in part-time hiring in public messaging,” says Javier. His intention was to keep the full time he had in Catalonia, “but there are many requests, and if I wanted to return I had no choice but to do it part-time,” he explains. With a degree in Business Administration, Javier has just started working at the Post Office in a town in the mining regions, and his salary is around 700 euros a month.