• UGT says women work 54 days more than men for same annual earnings
• Union launches #YoTrabajoGratis (‘I Work for Free’) awareness campaign
With men across Spain already having earned as much to date as female colleagues employed in similar jobs will entire in the entire year, women will have to work the last 54 days of this year virtually for free just to reach parity, according to a study released Monday in Madrid by the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT, ‘General Union of Workers’), Spain’s oldest labour federation.
The UGT study, based on figures provided by Spain’s National Statistical Institute (INE, Instituto Nacional de Estadisticas), shows that wage discrimination in Spain against women doing the same work as men currently accounts for an average pay gap nationwide of 23.25 percent, with women earning an average of just 19,755 euros annually doing the same work for which men earn 25,727 each year. The gap in pay between men and women is widest in Navarre (29,6%), Cantabria (28,4%) y Asturias (27,3%), according to the UGT, while working women come closer to earning the same as their male colleagues in the Balearic Islands and Castilla-La Mancha (20%), Extremadura (16,4%) and the Canary Islands (11,8%).
To raise awareness over the wage discrepancies between women and men, the UGT has launched a campaign using the social-media hashtag #YoTrabajoGratis (“I Work for Free”), highlighting the fact that women across Spain earn on average 6,000 euros less each year than men, which amounts to 200,000 euros less in earnings over the course of the women’s working lifetimes.
The UGT also noted that the wage gap is even greater among lower-wage workers, with 1.5 million women in Spain earning no more than the annual gross minimum wage of 9,034 euros — double the number of men working for minimum wage. At the same time, one of every four who are employed are working under a part-time contract, with more than 1.5 million women finding part-time contractual work their only option for participating in the labour force.
► Read More in Spanish at Europa Press, La Vanguardia and El País …
► Read Full Breakout of UGT Study in Spanish, here …
