The proposal that the CEOE put on the table to increase the interprofessional minimum wage (SMI) clings to the government’s latest agreement with the unions to update civil servants’ salaries: 1.5% increase by 2026. … With this approach, employers are aware, in reality, that the Ministry of Labor will increase the final figure to raise the SMI while awaiting the work of the committee of experts. And its figure is given by discarded.
In fact, the department headed by Yolanda Diaz believes that raising the SMI by 1.5% is an approach which ““That doesn’t seem rigorous.” Especially because it involves an increase that leaves more than two million workers “who will see a loss of purchasing power”, underline ministerial sources.
Labor’s intention, repeated in recent weeks by the second vice-president, is to raise the SMI above the current level of inflation. At least the cost of living will increase, a benchmark that, on average over the past 12 months, in 2.7%, precisely the rate at which pensions will be reassessed for next year. Anything less than this amount seems doomed to failure within social dialogue.
Employers refuse that the SMI does not take into account salary supplements
Beyond the proposed increase, the employer analysis warns against a reality which until now had not been put on the table: the “oversize” which already has, according to him, the inter-professional minimum wage. Their calculations estimate that, for the SMI to represent 60% of the average salary in Spain, if the data from the EPA (Active Population Survey) as a reference for 2025, the SMI would be 15,760 euros gross per year, or approximately 816 euros less per year than the current amount. “In other words, the SMI would currently be 4.9% higher than it was really matches,” underline the bosses.
The statement released by the CEOE with its proposal also touches on one of the most thorny issues facing the Labor Party: the possibility that SMI increases cannot be integrated into wage supplements. The employers demand that the increase be “conditional on the rules of compensation and absorption” established by the Workers’ Statute.
With or without taxation
It is with this in mind that the committee of experts will make a decision after also presenting the proposal of the UGT and the CC.OO., in which they urged the Executive to increase the SMI by 7.5%, if it were to be imposed on personal income tax. Or 2.7% if workers included in the minimum wage were not forced to do so.
New this year is a double proposal to increase the SMI: with or without taxation. The committee of experts will put on the table a new higher amount in case the Ministry of Finance decides to apply the personal income tax on this increaseas has already happened this year; or a lower amount, in case the first vice president, María Jesús Montero, chooses not to impose taxes on the more than two million workers included in the minimum wage.
The employer’s decision on the SMI comes after a quarter of high tension plagued by the initiatives of the Minister of Labor after having seen her flagship project of the legislature, the reduction of the working day to 37.5 hours, fall, in a set of decisions which were upset businessmen. The dialogue has already been broken by the law of prevention professional risks as well as at the negotiating table on new permissions due to the death of family members.
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