Experts have calculated how much the SMIC could rise in 2023… they have also proposed to reform it.
1.8%: the rise in the minimum wage in January 2023?
The exact data will not be known until mid-December 2022. Insee must publish the final inflation data for November 2022 for the calculation to apply. And the minimum wage in January 2023, which will have November 2022 as its reference month, will increase accordingly.
But with the provisional data, the group of independent experts in charge of the SMIC file with the government, purely advisory, attempted the calculation. According to them, the increase in January 2023 of the minimum wage in France will be 1.8%. This would represent approximately an increase of 30 euros gross (for a full-time job at 35 hours), underline The echoes.
This will then be the fourth revaluation of the SMIC in one year, the year 2022 having experienced two exceptional upgrades and one mandatory upgraderespectively in May, August and January. Currently at 1,678.95 euros, it could exceed 1,700 euros gross from the 1is January 2023.
Experts propose… to reform the calculation of the minimum wage
The successive increases in the SMIC in 2022 have not failed to be criticized by employers who see their charges increase accordingly. Conversely, the unions welcomed these increases, which gave them reason to demand increases for other salaries as well. All this against a background of high inflation and with one objective: indexation of all wages to inflation, as is done in Luxembourg.
The experts, on the contrary, take the opposite view of these claims and propose a reform of the SMIC. It would be a question of changing the formula of calculation in order to avoid too many successive increases. A triple revaluation in one year, as in 2022, could therefore not have taken place.
But one proposal goes even further: no longer increase the SMIC automatically on the basis of inflation at the beginning of the year but… on the evolution of wages negotiated within the branches. If these do not evolve, the SMIC would not evolve either.
And the purchasing power of employees paid the legal minimum would therefore no longer be protected. It will become dependent on negotiations which do not relate to their field. Not sure that the unions appreciate… and that the government wants to take the risk of following this idea.