Advertising agencies and unions sign wage deal to tackle inflation

Spain’s historically high inflation rate – 10.2% in June – is straining relations between employers and employees. Workers want their salaries to rise in line with price increases, but companies argue that inflation is too high to do so, especially at a time of economic recovery.

In the case of the advertising agency sector, both sides have been negotiating for months on how to deal with this situation. Finally, they have reached an agreement that satisfies both the agency employers (represented by FEDE, ACT and AM) and the workers (UGT and CCOO).

All these entities have recently signed a multi-year wage agreement to face the strong inflationary increases, as DIRCOMFIDENCIAL has been able to know.

According to the collective bargaining agreement for advertising agencies, this year employees’ salaries should have risen by 6.5% due to inflation. But at the beginning of the year, the employers already told the unions that they had financial difficulties to proceed with this increase. Negotiations then began, which have lasted several months.

The agreement reached between management and workers is to apply a 4% increase in wage scales and allowances for each year of the agreement. That is, from this year until 2025, retroactively from 1 January 2022. At the end of this period, the agencies will review the total CPI for these four years and if it exceeds the 16% already paid, they will compensate it with an additional payment in January 2026, which will also be added to the calculation bases for that year.

Employers and trade unions have agreed to increase the wage tables by 4% per year until 2025.

In addition to this, and as a complement to compensate for these delays in the collection of the real CPI, advertising agency employees will enjoy an additional day of holiday, exceptionally, in those years in which prices exceed the 4% agreed between 2022 and 2025. They would therefore have 23 working days of holiday.

The wage pact also guarantees that, for any objective dismissal that may occur in that period, the calculation of the relevant compensation will be based on the wage tables as if they had been updated to the real CPI for each year.

The unions maintain that with this agreement they have made “an important effort with the aim of not judicialising strict compliance with the agreement” and with “the firm will to continue negotiating it”.