As we know, wage increases in 2022 in France have, on average, not caught up with inflation. But a new study by the management of research, studies and statistics (Dares), published Thursday, February 2, provides us with some additional elements of analysis on the effect of inflation on wage growth. .
Indexed both to the evolution of consumer prices and to a share of the annual evolution of the purchasing power of workers and employees, the minimum interprofessional growth wage (smic) has been reassessed five times since October 2021 .
Increases which the rest of the employees were able to see on their pay slips that they did not have an impact, at this height, on their salary. Thus, between October 2021 and August 2022, the minimum wage increased by 5.6%, when all basic salaries (i.e. gross and excluding bonuses, i.e. the first line of the payslip) increased by 3.7%. Inflation was 5.4% over the same period.
Dares explains this difference in increase by several factors. First by the schedule of mandatory annual negotiations, legal framework for salary increases, which are only held once a year: there may therefore be a time lag between the automatic revaluation of the minimum wage and the increases for the rest salaries. The catch-up will perhaps reveal itself later in 2023.
Thus, after the revaluation of the minimum wage on 1er August 2022, 131 of the 171 professional branches monitored by the Ministry of Labor ended up with at least one pay grade below the minimum wage on the scale of their collective agreement. Which is illegal. However, a few rounds of negotiations later, at the end of December, this was only the case for 57 of them.
Another factor is the fact that only the salaries closest to the minimum wage benefit, by contagion, from its increase, in order to respect the hierarchical levels between employees. For this reason, wages rose more in sectors with many minimum wage earners. La Dares cites the example of the hotel and catering industry.
Trend reversal
This sector, which had the largest number of minimum wage workers in the 1er January 2022 (42%) is also the one where the base salary increased the most (+4.8%). On the contrary, the electricity and gas industries sector, which has very few wage earners at the minimum wage (0.5%) is also the one where base salary growth was the weakest (1.4% between the third quarters of 2021 and 2022).
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