38% of Spaniards have obtained a salary increase in the last twelve months, according to data obtained from a survey carried out by the employment portal Infojobs . This, however, has not helped most of these workers to improve their living conditions, since runaway inflation has devoured that increase and has even taken a bite out of the previous salary.
As a consequence, Spaniards would have lost, on average, 5% of purchasing power in the last year despite receiving salary increases, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) .
Moderate increases, triggered inflation . The data from the aforementioned survey indicates that the salary increases that Spaniards have achieved in the last year range between 1% and 5% of their salary, in many cases insufficient to face a general increase in the prices of consumer products. consumption that in July reached 10.8% , annual maximum.
In fact, 60% of those surveyed who have achieved this salary increase say that, even so, they have lost purchasing power , compared to 26% who indicate that it has only served to maintain it and 12% who affirm that it has increased it. The latter are usually workers with net monthly income of more than 2,000 euros or young professionals who have fewer family responsibilities, according to InfoJobs.
The data compiled by the employment portal coincides, more or less, with that collected by the July Collective Agreement Statistics of the Ministry of Labor, which reflected that salaries have only grown by 2.56% so far this year, a rise that under normal circumstances would be good news, but with inflation at 10.8% it is worrying.
No salary increase . The InfoJobs report also includes the main reasons given by companies for rejecting requests for salary increases from their employees. The most used has to do, precisely, with inflation: the company cannot afford it because the general increase in prices has reduced profits.
Organizations also often refuse because a raise has already taken place recently, because no employee is going to receive a raise, or because the person is relatively new to the company. However, 30% of the professionals who have been denied salary increases by their companies say that the organization did not offer them any kind of justification .
No update by the IPC . Despite the fact that a significant number of Spaniards have received a salary increase in the last year, very few companies have agreed to it to compensate for the rise in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The majority have undertaken these salary increases because the experience or position of the professional so deserved it (32%), because the increase in the Interprofessional Minimum Wage (SMI) decreed by the Government has forced them to do so (26%) or because of a job evaluation positive (17%). Only 4% have carried them out due to inflation.
A waste of time . The figures in the InfoJobs report are not all bad, since they assume that 40% of Spaniards have received a salary increase, although in the current economic context it is of little use to them. But they do attract attention because a few months ago another report , in this case by the international market research firm YouGov, indicated that only 20% of professionals in our country planned to ask for a salary increase in the following months.
Most of the respondents in that study indicated that they were not going to ask for a salary increase because they considered that it would be a waste of time, since there was no possibility that their employer would agree. In light of the new data, it seems that this pessimism was somewhat exaggerated, although it is also true that a not insignificant part of the increases carried out last year, 26%, have been motivated by the obligation imposed by the Government after increasing the SMI .