Salaries run behind a very high inflation / Web
Despite the reopening of parities and the advancement of pre-agreed salary adjustments, workers’ salaries lost again against inflation in October. According to a report published by the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses (Indec), in the tenth month of the year the salary index advanced 5.1%, against a general CPI of 6.3%.
The study is prepared based on the average income received by workers in all sectors, including state workers, private sector employees, and informal workers. The latter tend to “pull the average down” due to their low bargaining power.
This case was no exception. According to the study, the income of workers in the unregistered private sector advanced by barely 3.1% in the tenth month of the year, that is, 3.2 percentage points less than the CPI.
The adjustment of formal private employees was much better (5.3%), but even so they were below general inflation and could not shorten the negative gap that they accumulated during the year.
This time, the wages of public sector workers led the increases (6% in October), but still lost by 0.3 percentage points against inflation for that month.
The negative difference of 1.2 percentage points that the salary index had in October compared to the CPI, adds to the disadvantage that workers’ incomes already accumulated in the first nine months of the year.
The CPI advanced 76.6% between January and October of this year; and none of the salary branches could come close to that value. As reported by INDEC, both the registered private sector and the public sector accumulated a salary adjustment of 72.7% in the first ten months of 2022, which left them 3.9 percentage points below inflation for the same period. Although it is clear that some specific economic activities were able to overcome inflation (mainly those with strong unions, such as oil workers and banks), the vast majority of workers lost some points of purchasing power.
Worse still is the situation of informal employees, who do not have union representation or many legal tools to claim updates on their income.
