The Official State Gazette (BOE) has finally collected this Thursday the payment order of up to an additional 0.5% of the salary of more than three million public employees in the country, who work for the General Administration of the State; regional and local administrations; and public companies. This publication in the BOE comes after the Council of Ministers approved the payment of the increase this Tuesday and was necessary so that the officials in charge of preparing the payrolls incorporate this increase that, according to the salary agreement agreed between the Government and the CC OO and UGT unions, will consist of “a maximum additional salary increase of 0.5%.” This increase will be consolidated and will be applied, with effect from January 1, to the payroll that each public employee received last December.
The Government has given this payment order in extremis so that it can be included in the October payrolls of the entire public sector workforce, as stated in the salary agreement and also in the General State Budgets for 2023. In fact, For example, the General State Administration (AGE) —where the increase will be the stipulated maximum of 0.5%— closes this Thursday the preparation of its October payrolls for all staff.
Given this urgency, administrative sources have explained that in some departments there may not be time to include them in this month’s salary and their payment will be made in November, always with retroactive effects, so they will receive a kind of payment with this additional accumulated increase. ten or eleven months, depending on whether it is applied in October or November. And this same thing could happen in many other administrations. That said, it is striking that, unlike the additional increase applied last year, on this occasion the regional and local administrations have not been given more time to make this additional payment, when the communities and town councils were allowed to carry out the payment until March 31.
This additional increase may not be the last this year, since the agreement signed between the Government and the unions includes a possible second salary increase, in this case of 0.5%, with no possibility of it being lower, if the increase in Nominal GDP in 2023 was equal to or higher than that estimated in the macroeconomic table that accompanies the General State Budgets (2.1%). “This possible complementary increase for the year 2023, of a consolidated nature, would have effects from January 1, 2023,” this agreement also specifies.
At the moment, most forecasts point to the Spanish economy growing above that percentage if the latest revisions made by the European Commission are taken into account, which estimates an increase in Spanish GDP of 2.2% for this year, or by the Bank of Spain, which maintains its estimate of an increase of 2.3%.
another rise
By 2024, and always in compliance with the Framework Agreement agreed between the Government and the CC OO and UGT unions, public employees will have a fixed salary increase of 2% “based on the salaries already increased in the previous year.” But additional increases of 0.5% are also foreseen, if the sum of the variation in the harmonized CPI for the years 2022, 2023 and 2024 exceeds the accumulated fixed remuneration increase for 2022, 2023 and 2024 (8%). This additional increase would also have effects from January 1, 2024. “All these established increases cannot, in any case, be compensated or absorbed,” recalls the agreed text.
This same framework agreement led to an increase in the salaries of these workers of 3.5% in 2022 and to the new increases in 2023 those agreed for 2024 must be added; In total, they will receive an increase in their remuneration of more than 8% at least between the three years.
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