The recovery of the salary lost during the pandemic that began in 2020 begins to be this year “between question marks”, the Minister of Labor and Social Security, Pablo Mieres, admitted this Thursday.
At a press conference he was asked if it is possible to speed up salary recovery to deal with the price increase, Mieres replied that the question is rather “the other way around”, and elaborated: “It is to see what we do to prevent it from being postponed ( salary recovery) because the risk that we have today is that with the existing levels of inflation, that goal that we had of beginning to recover the real salary within the course of this year, begins to be between question marks, and that is what we have to analyze, see how we direct that”.
The salary recovery that had been proposed in the agreements reached in the Salary Councils at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, between June 2020 and June 2021, it was projected that inflation would be lower than what has been the year-on-year that in March 2022 stood at 9.38%.
“In addition to the price issue, on which the government is already working and we have taken some measures, there is the issue of the value of the salary with respect to the adjustments that were made last year, it is part of an analysis that we have to do,” added the minister of the government of Luis Lacalle Pou.
The salary running from behind
Data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) showed that between March 2021 and March 2022 the Average Salary Index grew by 6.96%, which, if compared to year-on-year inflation (between March 2021 and March 2022) , lost 2.42%.
At the same time, the public punishes the government’s measures to contain inflation with very little approval: a public opinion study by the Citizen Perception Unit of the University of the Republic concluded that only 6% of Uruguayans believe that the Executive is doing “enough” about it.
