Commentary
Since Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez took power in 2018, the country’s minimum wage has increased by 66 percent. Announced in February, the latest hike to the Spanish Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI) was agreed on by the Spanish government and two biggest labor unions, the UGT and CCOO, taking it to €1,221 per month. Sánchez said that raising the SMI, which is received by about 2.5 million workers, around 11 percent of Spain’s workforce, was a “matter of social justice and economic intelligence, which refutes those who predicted the disaster of any economy in the face of a minimum wage increase.”
