The race between inflation and salaries: according to a Government report, a group of large unions had falls greater than 10%

In this last group there are unions with a high level of representation such as commerce, metallurgical, food or textiles, all sectors linked to the domestic market. Others, such as oil workers or mining workers, are not covered by the sampling, but oil workers are, which is one of the sectors that exceeded prices.

It is one of the conclusions of the latest labor market report published by the Ministry of Labor, which measured the last variation in formal employment positions with information as of May.

In one section he also analyzed the behavior of the salary, in comparison with the inflation of the last year. Only when considering June, the month in which the CPI decelerated to 1.9%, the average real salary of registered private workers fell 0.9%. It was already coming off a monthly crash of 2.9% in May.

As analyzed by the labor portfolio, this last drop in June caused the average income to remain 0.6% below what it was in November 2023just before the change of Government. It is the first time in 20 months that it has happened. The report attributes the decline of the last two months to a deceleration in nominal wages greater than that recorded by prices.

Beyond the average, Labor observed a very marked dispersion between activities: some agreements managed to rebuild purchasing power in the last twelve months and others accumulated losses at a double-digit rate.

Of the 27 agreements used by the Ministry of Labor to follow the evolution of the established salary, seven recorded real improvement over the past year. The most important increases in purchasing power corresponded to Building managerscon 5,9%; truckerscon 3,1%; Construction and Pharmacywith 2.5% each; Sports entitieswith 1.7%; and Oil and Insuranceboth with 1.6%.

At the far end, four activities accumulated losses greater than 10% in real terms. The greatest setback corresponded to the agreement Textileswith a drop of 12.6%, followed by Metalworkerscon 12,4%; Tradewith 11%; and Footwearwith 10.5%. The report places Banking, Chemicals and Meat Industry in an intermediate zone, with variations close to zero or slight falls.

An additional fact that marks the official report is that the agreement salaries advanced at a much slower rate than the average salary. That is to say: joint ventures travel, on average, slower than the evolution of all salaries in the private sector. For this group of employees, salaries are almost 7 points below November 2023. The explanation could be in the fixed sums that are included in the agreement salary.

A recent report by the consulting firm CP on the progress of the purchasing power of income mentioned that “inflation around 2% seems to barely guarantee that salaries stagnate and do not fall again as at the end of 2025, but they do not recover previous levels.”

“The generalization of fixed sums allow only sporadic and heterogeneous recoveries. Only more disinflation and the adoption of larger fixed sums could allow a sustained recovery in real wages,” considered the consulting firm run by Federico Pastrana and Pablo Moldovan.

The monthly salary record made by the portfolio he directs Julio Cordero It only includes private sector workers in a dependency relationship. Indec has a broader approach: it observes registered public and private workers, plus an approximate and lagged measurement of informal workers’ income.

In May, the latest data available, registered salaries increased by 1.8% compared to inflation that month of 2.1%. This loss was greater for public sector salaries, which rose 1.5%, while private sector salaries increased 2%, according to Indec data.