Government approves minimum €52.11 pay rise for public sector

Portugal’s government approved on Thursday a minimum increase of €52.11 for public administration workers with salaries up to €2,700 in 2023, the minister of the presidency, Mariana Vieira da Silva, announced.

“All civil servants with salaries up to €2,700 will have a minimum increase of €52.11 and, from then on, the 2% salary update value will apply,” the minister explained to journalists at the end of a cabinet meeting.

The office of the minister of the presidency said that the minimum increase of €52.11 covers all state employees with salaries up to €2,612.04.

Mariana Vieira da Silva announced that the cabinet “today approved the two decree-laws under the multi-year agreement for the enhancement of public sector workers,” which will ensure predictability throughout this legislature and set the remuneration base of public sector employees at €761.58 and increases the value of public sector remuneration, corresponding to an annual salary increase equivalent to one salary level in each career, or 2% for all workers.

As the minister explained, the decree-laws increased the value of the meal subsidy to €5.20. They approved a series of measures to boost workers in state jobs, notably “the alteration of salary levels in the general career of senior technicians, in the career of technical assistants and the career of operational assistants, seeking to speed up progression in these careers and recover the salary levels of general public administration careers.

Additionally, they approved the upgrading of some special careers, which were reviewed, and that “had the same effect that was verified in general careers of compression of the base salary level, due to the evolution of the national minimum salary in recent years, seeking not to have a career so compressed”.

Also contemplated is the implementation of the rule of accumulation of surplus points, under the scope of the integrated system of management and performance evaluation in the Public Administration (SIADAP), “for the purposes of alteration of remuneratory positioning in performance evaluation, beginning in the 2021/2022 evaluation cycle,” she explained.

“These measures were part of a collective negotiation process that we have been having for some months with the unions representing public administration workers, which resulted in a multi-year agreement to enhance the value of public administration workers signed with FESAP and STE,” recalled the minister.

The Common Front of Public Administration Unions, which belongs to the Communist-backed CGTP confederation, did not sign the agreement.

The measures to increase public administration wages, promotions and progressions and the review of the pay scale will have a budgetary impact of €1.2 billion in 2023, the minister of the presidency told Lusa in October.

Asked about the fact that the proposal for 2023 was below the value of inflation estimated by the government of 7.4%, the minister stressed that the wage increase “is aligned with that which the government is proposing in Social Dialogue” under the agreement on income and competitiveness, stressing that it is necessary to take into account “an important point that is progressivity.

The government proposed a multi-year agreement to the civil service unions that contemplates salary increases of between 8% and 2%, with a minimum of around €52 per worker (equivalent to a difference in salary level) each year until 2026, and the appreciation of the general careers of senior technician, technical assistant and operational assistant.

This year, most of the 740,000 civil servants had a salary increase of 0.9%, in line with inflation in November 2021, minus 0.1% of deflation.

The set of measures in 2022 for the civil service, including progressions and promotions, the increase in the minimum wage and new entries, had an impact of €680 million, equivalent to a 2.7% increase in the wage bill, according to the government.