Spain raises the minimum wage by 8% to 1,080 euros, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced today.
The increase is the result of an agreement with the unions, said Pedro Sánchez, who spoke in the Spanish Senate (upper house), without mentioning the employers’ organisations.
The Spanish minimum wage (paid every 14 months) will thus be 60% of the average salary in the country, said Sánchez, who underlined that this was one of the commitments he took on for the current legislature, which ends this year.
Spain has scheduled regional and municipal elections for May 28 and there will be general parliamentary elections at the end of the year.
The current government consists of a coalition of the Socialist Party (PSOE, led by Pedro Sánchez) and the far-left party platform Unidas Podemos.
The minimum wage in Spain is currently 1000 euros gross.
In ongoing negotiations, the unions asked for an increase to 1,100 euros.
At this intervention in the Senate, the Spanish Prime Minister said that he wanted to increase the purchasing power of the Spaniards, which he considered to be very low, and recalled that the country ended 2022 with an inflation (increase in prices compared to the same period of last year) of 5.7%, with the minimum wage increase announced today being higher.
Spain ended last year with the lowest inflation in the European Union (EU), after one of the highest values in the first half of 2022 and the highest rate in the country since 1984 in July (10.8%).
The average inflation in Spain in 2022 was 8.4%.
In the course of 2022, Spain adopted six packages of measures to respond to an inflation rate of more than 3% of gross domestic product (GDP), about €45,000 million, including direct support to consumers and businesses and tax benefits, such as the reduction of the VAT on electricity and gas for 5% or a discount of 20 cents per liter on the purchase of fuel.
In the same debate today in the Senate, the leader of the largest opposition party (Partido Popular), Alberto Núñez Feijóo, told Sánchez that in 2022 Spain will experience one of the “biggest inflationary processes in recent decades” and that the country will be in the last of Europe recovering pre-pandemic GDP.
Spain’s GDP grew by 5.5% in 2022, the same rate as in 2021.
Source: DN
