UPDATED ASSESSMENT OF SPAIN'S WAGE RATE GAP 1996-2011

In 2011 Spain and the rest of euro-area countries, for all workers employed in the manufacturing sector, do not appear to be affected yet by the global capitalist crises.

Broadly, the result of the planned process of convergence with the major economies of the EU, Spain's GDP income per capita is now not far from them and moves in symmetry. Unfortunately, the gradual transformation of Spanish wages into living wages is bound to experience a hard regression to the levels recorded many years ago. As could be expected,the ensuing effects of the systemic global capitalist crisis began to exert a toll on real wages in the entire Euro area in 2009, which continued in 2010 and 2011 and will be felt far more harshly from 2012 onward. Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Belgium and Spain have been forced to impose drastic economic policies that can no longer be considered supply sided or even recessionary but truly economically depressive. A euro-area policy centred on the harsh reduction of publicdeficits to 3% of GDP by 2013 –which will not be met at all– is drastically cutting budgets in all areas of government at both national and municipal levels. In the case of Spain, the recorded deficit for 2012 was 6,98% of GDP, more than the 6,3% negotiated for the year with the European Commission. Needless to say, everybody knows that the 2013 goal will not be met whatsoever. Hence the European Commission asserts that unless even harsher measures are applied, the public deficit in 2013 will be 6,7% and 7,2% in 2014 vis-à-vis the planned 2,8% (Joaquín Maudos, Varapalo a las previsiones, Cinco Días, 28-2-2013).
The capitalist systemic crisis has served to ensue a new assault on labour rights and the Welfare State in Spain and across the entire European Union. This will in all certainty decrease the workers' share of income and increase the employers shareholder value in the coming years. A new assessment reckons a drop of unit labour cost of 5,8% in 2012(Jose Antonio Vega, La devaluación de los costes se ceba en el trabajo, que se abarata el 5,8% en 2012, Cinco Días, 28-02-2013). The same assessment reckons that labour's share of income has dropped and in the fourth-quarter 2012 it was less than the employers' share (44,24% vs. 46,21% respectively) whereas in 2011 labour share was still ahead (47,8 vs 43,6%). Consequently, we continue to foresee that living-wage equalisation indices of Spain and the rest of the EU with the U.S. will surely decrease in the coming years and will produce a real wage gap that will not improve as long as fiscal policy remains excessively centred on deficits and inflation –with the ulterior motive of creating the ideal conditions for maximising the shareholder value of the EU's true masters: the institutional investors of international financial markets.
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