The Government imposes a 5% increase in the minimum wage on employers, up to 1,134 euros

The minimum Social Security contribution bases will also rise by 5%, which represents an additional increase in costs for companies, in addition to salaries.

In short, the Government will apply the increase in the SMI and the minimum contribution bases with retroactive effect from January 1. Among other things, because the Council of Ministers will take time to approve the decree that makes the improvement of this income effective. This is due to the administrative processing that the standard must now go through.

In any case, the Government thus punishes CEOE and Cepyme for not accepting an agreement with the unions to increase rent by 4%. That is, the first proposal that Yolanda Díaz made to them, after verifying that, ultimately, the businessmen were willing to reach that figure, if inflation exceeded 3% at the end of the year.

The problem was in the businessmen's demand that companies could affect the increase in the minimum wage in public tenders. A request that the first vice president and Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, rejects. Without that proposal, CEOE and Cepyme were not going to sign anything. The employers' associations also requested a 20% bonus on the social contributions of companies in the rural sector.

Therefore, the Government and the unions have agreed on a 5% increase in the SMI for next year, instead of 4%, upon verifying that the employers were not going to sign anything that did not register these two demands.

For this reason, after this morning's meeting, the Secretary of State for Employment, Joaquín Pérez Rey, said the following: "[The agreement with the employers] could not be. We have given our all, we have tried until the end. last minute and we have not achieved it, but we have reached an agreement with the unions to raise the SMI by 5%". An increase that will mean an increase of 54 euros more per month. From 1,080 to 1,134 euros per month. The number of workers benefiting from this measure amounts to more than 2.5 million people, of which a third will be women and young people, who, from now on, "will be able to live better."

"This increase will also allow us to raise the hourly wage of domestic workers and continue advancing in a more prosperous country, which ends the wage differential with Europe, which continues to fight against the gender gap and which redeems itself from the fatal element that is wage poverty," Pérez Rey highlighted.

The president of the CEOE, Antonio Garamendi, defined the Government's decision as a swallow: "If you don't want a cup, a cup and a half," said Garamendi, who insisted on transferring the increases in the SMI to public contracts, a request rejected from the Government.

Therefore, for the third consecutive year, the employers' association has not signed an agreement to increase the interprofessional minimum wage. The last time was in 2020, when the rent went from 900 to 950 euros per month.