Treasury technicians (Gestha) indicate that the gap would have been greater were it not for the ERTE or the recent rises in the SMI
The coronavirus crisis has left economic wounds from which the country has not yet fully recovered. It has also done so in salary terms. Not all workers have navigated the waves of the pandemic the same. And tourism and leisure, among the sectors hardest hit by the crisis, dominate the block with lower wages and more temporary work.
In this environment, and according to calculations made for this medium by the union of Technicians of the Ministry of Finance (Gestha), the wage inequality of Spaniards increased by 7% in 2020, the first year of the covid-19 pandemic .
The technicians have calculated the data from the AEAT salary estimates for the full year, excluding part-time workers and those who earn more than 720,000 euros. And from them it is concluded that the Gini index (one of the most used measures to express income inequality among the citizens of a territory) stood at 27.92 points in 2020, which implies a notable jump from 26.10 2019 points.
In that exercise, precisely, the Government raised the minimum wage by 22% to 900 euros. “Undoubtedly, the increase in the SMI in 2019 and 2020 decreased wage inequality, although the impact on the total effect in the year of the pandemic cannot be quantitatively broken down,” the experts indicate.
These technicians also remind us that the higher the Gini index, the greater the income inequality in the population. That is, a few charge more than the rest.
Safety net
The income gap among Spanish citizens would have widened even more were it not for the safety net put in place to curb the impact of the pandemic. This is the case of the ERTE which, according to details from Gestha, were concentrated in the 2,890,481 people with part-time or contracts lasting less than a year and with lower salaries (42.7% of the total number of workers), «mainly among the 1,210,432 affected by an ERTE who entered between 6,650 and 13,300 euros per year.
A figure that represents 35% of that salary bracket. Immediately after are the 877,298 affected by ERTE who entered up to 6,650 euros per year, which represent 19.8% of that section, and the 802,751 affected by the measure who entered between 13,300 and 19,950 euros per year, which represent 35% of that Stripe.