Significant table increases and one-off payments of up to 3,000 euros have shaped the collective bargaining agreements in 2023. The bottom line is that there is too little left, says the trade union Böckler Foundation.
Despite comparatively high wage agreements, many collectively bargained employees have to accept losses in real wages again this year. This emerges from an evaluation presented on Thursday by the trade union Böckler Foundation, which examined collective agreements for a total of around 14.8 million employees. According to this, collective wages rose by an average of 5.6 percent in the current year and thus remained below the assumed annual inflation of 6.0 percent.
Only when the individual tax and duty advantages of the high one-off payments were taken into account was inflation exceeded in most cases, explained the head of the foundation’s own WSI tariff archive, Thorsten Schulten.
Nominal tariff increases of this magnitude have occurred since the current statistical series was introduced in 1998. However, the sharp increase in inflation following the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine is also unprecedented during this period. In order to alleviate the consequences for employees, the federal government agreed with employers and unions to exempt special payments of up to 3,000 euros from taxes and duties in 2023 and 2024.
According to Schulten, this effect cannot be calculated across all negotiated wages. As an example, he cited the degree in the federal and local public service, which brought salary increases of 9.8 percent with this effect instead of 6.8 percent without it.
Expert: Less pressure on the contractual partners
The one-off payments themselves were included in the calculations for 2023 and will now dampen the expected wage increases in the coming years. As politicians intended, they had offset the price increases in the current year, said Schulten. The flat-rate inflation compensation bonuses primarily benefited the lower wage groups, who also benefited above average from the often agreed fixed amounts for wage growth. “The collective bargaining parties have thus taken into account the fact that the lower wage groups suffer particularly from the high rates of price increases.”
For the coming year, the expert expects slightly less pressure on contractual partners in view of falling inflation rates. However, given the real wage losses in recent years, there is still a lot of catching up to do. According to Böckler’s calculations, current real wages are now back to the 2016 level after three years of negative earnings.
Source: Stern
