Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2012, four years into the crisis. All figures date from 2012, including executives averaging about 873,000 euros against about 37,000 euros per employee, and the gender pay gap and pay cuts it cites. The reference years of the data are not given.
Those who earned the least before the crisis earn even less now, and executives, who earned the most, earn even more. The crisis is sharply widening the gap between rich and poor, with the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer. One group can earn up to 24 times as much as the other.
Thanks to the transparency law, we can get an idea of these huge pay differences, although in some cases they are distorted by the multimillion-euro severance packages of some executives, which are recorded as pay.
When the crisis began, executives earned an average of about 873,000 euros, while the cost of an employee was very close to 37,000 euros. After these four years of crisis, the gap has grown instead of shrinking.
According to data from Spain’s National Statistics Institute (INE), managers in public administrations or small companies with more than ten employees earn three times as much as the average worker and four times as much as the lowest category: labourers in agriculture, fishing or construction.
Twenty-three IBEX groups have the widest gaps between executives and employees. Some examples are Ferrovial, Inditex, Abengoa, Repsol and OHL, while the gap is smallest at companies such as Bankinter, CaixaBank, Endesa, Mediaset and Red Eléctrica. Let’s bear in mind that the most common salary among Spaniards is around a thousand euros (a month), and that the best-paid sectors are banking and electricity.
We are living at a time when more and more voices are calling for wages to be tied to the productivity of each job. However, the statistics show that pay rises have outpaced inflation.
Another major pay gap is the usual one between men and women. Today, men earn 25,000 euros, while women stay at 19,500 euros. The gap narrows when we compare similar situations in terms of type of contract, working hours, occupation or length of service. Young people also earn less than older workers, because of seniority and depending on their type of contract: permanent or temporary.
The best salaries are in electricity and banking. The lowest are in hospitality, where they don’t reach 14,000 euros. The Basque Country pays its employees best, and workers in the Canary Islands have lower salaries than the rest of the country. Young people are the hardest hit by this situation, with average pay cuts of 3.4% for those under 20 and 3.8% for those aged 25 to 29.
Featured image: -Merce- from Madrid, España, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
