The data was especially expected in the political sphere, since the government is committed to a recovery of real wages to bring it to pre-pandemic levels. In this sense, the real salary of January 2023 is located 1.3% below the January 2020 record. So that the gap with that salary level has gradually narrowed, although the recovery is still not complete.
Uruguay defined significant reductions in mobility before the arrival of the virus in 2020, but had its worst wave of infections at the beginning of 2021, so that the economy suffered the impact of the pandemic for a period of more than a year, affecting activity and employment.
Behavior by sectors
Among the sectors that showed a greater advance in wages, the health, which had an interannual increase of 13.8% nominal, which implies almost 6% increase in real terms. The industry followed education, with a nominal annual increase of 11.3%, which implies a real increase of more than 3%. In fact almost all sectors had real increasesthat is, above inflation.
The exception is still the area of restaurants and hotels –one of the sectors most affected by the pandemic– which had an average nominal increase of 7.6%. This implies a retracement of almost half a point in real terms.
The manufacturing industry had an average increase in their salaries in the last year of 10%, although there were appreciable differences between sectors. In the area of agribusiness and foodand also in pulp productionthe nominal increase was higher than 11%, while in the textile sector was less than 7%
All these sectors correspond to non-state workerswhich on average had an increase in real wages of 2.2% in the last year. For the state workers the average increase was higher than in the rest of the economy, with an increase in real wages of 2.7% annual to January.
Source: Ambito
