One of the recurring anxieties of the cavern is the increase in the minimum interprofessional wage (SMI), which the Sánchez government has been substantially adjusting upwards. (But we are not crazy about it either, as the Island of Poland, because we don't even come close to the more than 2,000 euros per month of France, the Netherlands, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland or Luxembourg.) In any case, during all these years the refrain has been the same: increasing the minimum wage would entail a hard blow in terms of an increase in unemployment. As this has not been the case –on the contrary–, now we have to look for new strategies, lest the enemy be recognized as a damn good news.
It is in this context that the headline ofThe World"Workers with salaries close to the minimum wage have tripled since Sánchez took office, and Airef warns of "future commitments for the pension system." The newspaper says that in 2018, 3.5% of workers were earning the minimum wage, while by 2023, the percentage had risen to 7.4%. Oh, right. Because the lowest salary then was €10,290 per year, and by 2023, it had been corrected to €15,120. It's normal that many more people are included. The headline suggests "more people earning the minimum" instead of "more people earning 50% more." And yes, there are derivatives for future pensions, but those higher salaries are also what generate higher tax revenues with which to pay for current pensions, which is a much more immediate and pressing problem. The economy is a system of vast interconnections in which a single figure is difficult to provide a reliable indicator. This means that isolating a number allows for triumphalist and catastrophic discourses at will, but the reader deserves analyses that show pros and cons, and not Manichean narratives that systematically hide the good or bad, depending on the editorial line.
