The year started with an improvement in the number of jobs, but with a decline in wages relative to inflation

the landscape of job and the wages started 2023 with disparate data. According to official data, in January there was a creation registered jobs 0.4% compared to December, even if at the same time private income lost more than two percentage points against inflationwhich was 6%.

It’s a trend that some specialists were already highlighting last year: a job market that signs of recovery while living, simultaneously, with a decline in purchasing power salaries. This behavior has shown itself again in the first early indices published by the Ministry of Labor in recent hours.

According to the labor portfolio, the Ripte index, which measures private wages, in January incomes saw a change of 3.8%so they lost against the 6% inflation recorded that same month.

The state has different ways of measuring the evolution of wages in the economy. He against the current considers the average remuneration subject to contributions to the Argentine Integrated Pension System (SIPA) received by workers in the context of a dependency relationship and reported continuously over the past 13 months. i.e. employees private employee.

In any case, this is a less extensive sample than the wage index published – also on a monthly basis – by INDEC. In this report, the statistical agency breaks down the labor market into formal private and public, on the one hand, and informal, on the other.

The year 2022, for example, ended with equally disparate wage figures depending on the segment of the labor market considered. The total index resulted in a variation of 90.4%under the 94.8% with which it closed the 2022 annual CPI reported by INDEC. When breaking down each sector, we saw that the worst was taken, with a big difference, by the informal employees: his salary has increased 65.4%so they were almost 30 dots below the price beat.

Among those registered, salaries saw a nominal improvement of 95.8% they therefore found themselves slightly above inflation. In any case, when these data are broken down, we see that among those registered, the only ones who found themselves with a salary higher than the annual CPI were workers in public sectorwhose income has increased 99.4%while those in the private sector 93.8%.

Thus, recorded real wages increased 0.7% during 2022, cutting a four consecutive years back-to-back falls that began in 2018. The improvement was driven by the rise in 2.1% public sector workers, since private sector employees barely avoided the loss of purchasing power (0%). The main factor behind this phenomenon was the shortening of the joint negotiationswhich has allowed the agreements to be less permeable to erosion caused by inflationary ‘surprises’,” says an Ecolatina report.

Job prospects started the year with a 0.4% improvement compared to December, at least if we take into account the report of the Survey of Labor Indicators (SLI), which is an early indicator of the evolution of the labor market.

Unlike Argentina’s Integrated Pension System (SIPA), which is also published by the ministry headed by Rachel Olmo, the scope of the EIL is more limited, since it includes private sector companies that have more than 10 employees on their payroll in certain urban areas. In any case, it is generally used as preliminary data for SIPA, which is a further month behind schedule.

According to the EIL for the month of January, thus, “the level of registered private employment increased by 0.4% compared to the previous month. This increase is mainly due to the increase in employment in the construction and increases of transportation there financial services“, mentioned the portfolio of work.

Thus, he recovered after the 0.3% retracement December. “Thus, the growth trend that had been observed since July 2021 resumes, and which was only interrupted during the months of December due to the seasonal decline in employment in the construction sector and education. Year-on-year, there is an increase in employment of 2.3%,” the ministry estimates.

The Labor Portfolio, on the other hand, released the SIPA indicator for December, and with it that for the whole of 2022. The report concludes that at the end of last year, the number of people with a recorded work in the country total reached 13,077,000. “In seasonally adjusted terms, it presented a positive change in the 0.2% compared to the previous month (27.7 thousand more people). Compared to the same month of the previous year, registered work increased 4.9% (+607.9 thousand workers)”, measured Labour.

Looking at the full picture of 2022, we can see that December’s monthly improvement (0.2%) is, along with August’s, the positive changes different soup who registered the registered labor market. There were two peaks between June and July, with monthly improvements of 0.6%. In the second half of the year, labor market dynamics began to cool.

Facing the rest of 2023, for Ecolatina “the main vector for this will be to validate parities which, whatever the magnitude of the increases, are characterized by being short termallowing some adaptability to nominality throughout the year”.

“In this way, we expect that in general, formal workers will continue to follow national inflation closely. In particular, we expect recorded real wages to rise slightly again. below 1% of the annual average, resulting in a drop of around 4.5% throughout the four years of the Frente de Todos”, considers a report by this consultancy.

Meanwhile, for the autonomous CTA Social Law Observatory, “for 2023, the scenario for workers and workers does not look promising. Activity fell in September, October and November, and the program promoted by the national government to contain inflation includes measures that will limit economic growth in the short term (adjustment of public spending, interest rate hikes, restrictions on imports)”.

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