The Government will make a decision on the civil servants' salary increase based on the results offered by the negotiation carried out by employers and unions for the renewal of the Agreement for Employment and Collective Bargaining (AENC), some conversations in which, For the moment, there has been no agreement.

This has been advanced by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez.

"Right now unions and businessmen are negotiating this rent agreement, where not only do we have to talk about salaries, we also have to talk about dividends, the distribution of profits by large companies, and based on that we will see what is the evolution and the negotiation that is articulated with respect to public workers", he stated in an interview on Antena 3.

The Bank of Spain, in its economic forecasts, forecasts an average inflation of 7.5% for this year -in March it rose to 9.8%-, a rate that will be reduced to 2% in 2023 and 1.6% in 2024 .

The negotiations between unions and employers are not too far away when it comes to taking underlying inflation as a reference data, which is 3.4% and discarding the CPI data.

Thus, the employer's proposal contemplates a salary increase of 3.5% for this year, 2.5% for 2023 and 2% for 2024, in line with the moderation of inflation that is expected for the next years.

The unions, for their part, demand a rise of 3.4% by 2022 and 2.5% in 2023 with 2% in 2024. The difference is that for the workers' representatives it is essential to set review clauses at the end of each financial year so that salaries do not lose purchasing power.

The clauses do not have to force a 100% update, the unions point out, but they do allow some protection against inflation that, although it softens in the coming months, will consolidate the loss of purchasing power already assumed.

For employers, these clauses, which have disappeared from collective agreements in the last decade, are unacceptable and call for moderation with proposals for improvement linked to productivity and job creation.

Sánchez has not specified to what extent salary revisions will be linked in the private and public sectors.

But including civil servants in the income agreement that distributes the cost of inflation would mean a loss of purchasing power for these workers.

Last year, the average salary increase agreed upon in the companies' agreement was 1.47%, while in December, in view of the direction prices were taking, the more than 2.71 million public employees already sued the Ministry of Treasury improve the salary increase of 2% included in the project of the General State Budgets (PGE) for 2022..

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