The Ministry of Labor and Social Security (MTSS) presented this Wednesday a report on the situation of the real salary as of January 2023, compared to July 2020 –before the pandemic–. For that, he presented detailed information based on the results of the agreements closed in the sphere of the Salary Councils.
The central message of this report is that 40.5% of all private sector workers (351,475) have increased their real wages compared to July 2020.
Within that universe there is a group of 189,186 workers (21.8%) registering increases in purchasing power of more than 1%. Meanwhile, another group of 162,289 (18.7%) register an improvement in purchasing power of less than 1%.
These are workers in the refrigeration industry, the metallurgical sector, the dairy industry, the chemical industry, port services, the agricultural sector in general, information technology, domestic service and the beverage sector, among others.
Last week, the Minister of Economy and Finance, Azucena Arbeleche, affirmed that the recovery of wages is “underway” and will be “consolidated” in the coming years. “We are starting the recovery phase. After a first phase where the focus was on employment and the result was good, we added the focus of real wage growth”, insisted the minister.
The other face
What does the other side of the coin say? The figures show that there is currently a majority of private wage earners, made up of 517,104 workers (59.5% of the total) who register losses in purchasing power in comparison with July 2020.
It’s about 253,654 workers (29.2%) who have losses in purchasing power of less than 2.6%, and another group made up of 263,450 employees (30.3%) with losses of more than 2.6%.
The first group includes sectors such as stores, supermarkets, supergas, financial intermediation, security companies, call centers and some rural sectors, among others.
And the second group, the one that lost the most salary, belongs to various sectors of transportation, hotels, restaurants, footwear, tannery, clothing and catering services, among others, according to official information.
In mid-2021, the government presented the guidelines that guided the last round of negotiations. There, adjustments based on projected inflation were agreed, plus a component for the partial recovery of the purchasing power lost between the middle of 2020 and 2021 (4.1%) during the bridge period.
The commitment of the Executive Branch was that the recovery would begin to take place in 2022 and it would be completed in the next round of negotiations, starting in the second half of 2023, that is, before the end of the government period.
From this point of view, the numbers today agree with the government authorities because the recovery has begun. This does not mean that there is still great heterogeneity in the purchasing power situation of all workers and in the rate at which wages are being recovered.
