Only four out of every ten salaried workers, specifically 39%, have in their collective agreements a wage review clause that protects them against the loss of purchasing power resulting from rising prices. However, coverage varies greatly depending on the branch of activity, according to data from the Ministry of Labour accessed by Europa Press, prepared from the agreements registered up to September of this year.
Thus, while 71.9% of construction employees and 70.2% of industrial workers subject to collective bargaining have these guarantee clauses in their agreements, in agriculture they barely reach 7.5% of salaried workers and in services they only reach 25%.
Up to September, 1,724 agreements had been formalized in the services sector, with economic effects for more than 6.3 million employed people, but only about 1.6 million of them (1,577,354) had a wage review clause, which is equivalent to 25% of the total.
In agriculture, the number of agreements registered up to September amounted to 36, which affected 122,997 workers, although only 9,265 had a wage guarantee clause incorporated into their agreement.
Industry added 1,204 agreements registered up to September, which covered nearly 1.9 million salaried workers (1,897,460). Of these, more than 1.3 million had a review clause, that is, seven out of ten (70.2%).
In the field of construction, the agreements registered up to the ninth month of the year were 74, with an impact on 1,003,046 workers, of whom seven out of ten (71.9%) were protected against inflation spikes through a wage review clause.
Only three out of every ten agreements include wage review
According to the Labour statistics, between January and September 3,038 collective agreements were registered, but only 29.8% (906 agreements) incorporated a wage guarantee clause and, of these, 641 provided for its application with retroactive effects.
The agreements that do include a review clause cover more than 3.6 million workers out of the more than 9.3 million covered by the agreements in force up to September, which represents 39% of the total.
Thus, six out of every ten salaried workers do not have safeguard clauses in their collective bargaining agreements. Even so, the percentage of workers protected by this mechanism improves by almost 18 points the figure recorded in December 2023 (21.08%).
Construction leads the agreed wage increases
The salary increases agreed in the agreement stood on average at 3.05% in September, slightly above August’s 3.04%, but almost 1.9 points below that month’s CPI, whose year-on-year rate reached 4.9%.
By branch of activity, construction recorded the largest average wage increase in the agreement, at 3.09%, followed by services (3.06%) and industry (2.99%). Agriculture shows the smallest average pay improvement, at 2.73%.
Trade union organizations and employers’ associations have pending this year the negotiation of a new Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC), after the pact in force until then expired in December, which recommended wage increases of 3% for 2025, with a wage review clause that, in the event of inflation deviating, could imply additional increases of up to 1% for each of the years of the agreement (2023-2025).
Looking ahead to the new framework, the trade union organizations UGT and CCOO have put on the table before the employers’ associations a fixed annual wage increase of 4% for the next three years, which would mean an accumulated increase in wages of 12% by 2028.
Likewise, they have proposed an additional increase of 1% in the agreements where the average salary is 10% below the national average salary, an extra 2% for salaries situated 20% below the national average salary and an increase of 3% for those that are 30% below.
In the same way, they propose an additional increase of 1.5% for each of the years in the event of inflation deviation.