After years of salary restraint, Spain’s trade unions are starting to win their first salary related battles. Employees are effectively starting to win back some of the purchasing power they forfeited during the economic and financial crisis. Collective convention renewal agreements signed in recent months have started re-introducing salary revision clauses (i.e. clauses guaranteeing catch-up pay if effective inflation exceeds expected inflation), which had been done away with during the most difficult years of the economic and financial crisis. Although the number is rising, close to one in four employees is covered by this type of salary guarantee, whereas prior to 2008 this was the case for three out of four employees.
According to the data, 21.8% of collective conventions operating in July 2019 once again include a salary revision clause that still goes by the name of the ‘safeguard clause’. At 21.8, the percentage significantly exceeds that of the 13.06% recorded for 2015. Currently 22.9% of all employees now benefit from this guarantee, and although higher than the 13.94% for 2015, the percentage is vastly inferior to that recorded for 2008 when prior to the outbreak of the crisis 54.4% of collective conve
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