MADRID, 12 Mar. (EUROPA PRESS) -
The Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Function, José Luis Escrivá, confirmed this Tuesday that the 2% salary increase agreed for this year with CCOO and UGT for public employees will go into the anti-crisis decree that is being processed as a draft law in the Cortes through an amendment to the text.
"An amendment is going to be incorporated into the Royal Decree-Law that we have called for urgent measures to fight against the crisis caused by the war in Ukraine (...) It is the appropriate element," said the minister at the press conference after the Minister council.
Escrivá recalled that this increase was agreed with CCOO and UGT in the Framework Agreement for a 21st Century Administration and thanked both unions for their support throughout this process.
Without waiting for the presentation of the 2024 General State Budget project to include this salary increase, PSOE and Sumar have taken advantage of the parliamentary processing of the anti-crisis decree to introduce this amendment that includes a 2% salary increase for public employees with the option to half a point more.
This is a proposal for legislative modification, to which Europa Press has accessed, with which the coalition partners introduce a new article to the text to approve the increase in remuneration of personnel serving the public sector in 2024, since the Budgets are extended and, for the moment, they cannot use that route.
The bill derived from the decree will be approved in the coming weeks in the Finance Commission, to then be sent to the Senate and be in force approximately in April, while the General State Budgets of 2024, which have not yet been approved in the Council of Ministers, it will take two months to complete its parliamentary processing.
CCOO and UGT have stressed this Tuesday in a joint statement that this increase will affect more than five million public employees and have recalled, as the minister has done, that it responds to what was agreed with the Government in the Framework Agreement for an Administration of the 21st century.
In this sense, the unions have highlighted that in 2022 and 2023 the maximum salary objectives included in said framework agreement were met, which represents more than 7% increases. To these we will have to add the 2% planned for this year 2024, with an additional increase of 0.5% pending later if the conditions associated with the IPCA are met.
In fact, that the final increase will be 2.5% is foreseeable, since that additional 0.5% is conditional on the sum of the variation in the harmonized CPI between 2022 and 2024 exceeding the accumulated fixed remuneration increase for that period , something that, in the absence of knowing this year's inflation, has already happened.
And the harmonized inflation between 2022 and 2023 has been 8.8%, while the fixed increase in public salaries reaches 8%. However, the wording of the article states that this will not be consolidated until next year, when the National Institute of Statistics publishes the 2024 harmonized CPI data.
If inflation finally exceeds the increase in salaries, as is expected to happen, the Council of Ministers will approve the additional increase of 0.5 points, which would have retroactive effects from January 1, 2024.
With this amendment, the agreement signed with UGT and CCOO on public sector salaries would be fulfilled, where an increase of up to 9.5% was agreed between 2022 and 2024. In said agreement, a fixed salary increase of 8% was included. and a variable one of 1.5% linked to the evolution of inflation and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
