The Economic and Social Research Institute (WSI) has published its annual overview of collective bargaining across Europe which it says “shows with alarming clarity that workers are the losers in the current wave of inflation: across Europe. The purchasing power of wages fell by 4.0% last year.” The report reveals that negotiated wages in the Eurozone rose by 2.8% in 2022, the second highest increase in over 20 years but the impact of inflation turned this into a 5.2% decline in real terms. The overview provides further evidence that profits more than wages are contributing to higher inflation, as the report says: “a sober look at data from the European Central Bank and Eurofound shows that the development of negotiated wages cannot explain the high inflation rates of recent months.”
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For more information, please contact Paul de Beer or Oana Ciuca, De Burcht (Scientific Bureau for the Dutch Trade Union Movement) p.t.debeer@uva.nl or the Head of communications at the ETUI, Mehmet Koksal mkoksal@etui.org. For previous full issues of the Collective bargaining newsletter please visit https://www.etui.org/Newsletters/Collective-bargaining-newsletter or consult the archive with all articles in our database at www.cbnarchive.eu.
You may find further information on the ETUI at www.etui.org.