While the European Minimum Wage Directive, aimed at establishing adequate minimum wages in the EU, adopted in 2022, required Member States to work towards an 80% collective bargaining coverage rate for workers, 18 Member States still had homework to do as of at least June 2026 (Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia).
And by 15 June, the Commission had received action plans from only 12 Member States (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania and Slovakia), according to a report published on Monday 27 July on the data and information provided by the Member States concerning the protection offered by minimum wages, as well as on the action plans aimed at promoting collective bargaining.
The report is divided into two parts: the first concerns the level of protection offered by minimum wages in the Member States, while the second deals with the degree of collective agreement coverage, the Directive having set a coverage target of 80% to be reached and an obligation to establish a national action plan for countries below that level.
In the first part, the Commission notes that all Member States have a system of protection offered by minimum wages, either in the form of statutory minimum wages or through collective bargaining.
Twenty Member States state that they have a statutory minimum wage, while seven provide protection offered by minimum wages exclusively through collective agreements.
There are therefore statutory minimum wages in these countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.
Protection offered by minimum wages exclusively through collective agreements exists, for its part, in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Italy and Sweden.
Statutory minimum wages. Unsurprisingly, statutory minimum wage levels vary considerably from one Member State to another in nominal terms.
In 2023, Luxembourg (€2,509 per month), Germany (€2,023) and the Netherlands (€1,965) reported the highest minimum wages, followed by Ireland (€1,910) and France (€1,735).
In Spain and Slovenia, they stood at around €1,200. The lowest minimum wages were recorded in Bulgaria (€399), Hungary (€615), Latvia (€620) and Romania (€622).
Expressed in purchasing power standards, gross monthly minimum wages were highest in 2023 in Luxembourg and Germany, followed by the Netherlands and France. The lowest statutory minimum wages were reported by Bulgaria, Latvia and the Czech Republic.
In line with the objectives laid down by the Directive, the variation in nominal minimum wages between Member States decreased between 2021 and 2023, the Commission notes. Over that period, increases in statutory minimum wages also offset the losses in purchasing power caused by high inflation in around half of the Member States.
In 2023, real statutory minimum wages were higher than in 2021 in 10 of the 18 Member States for which data were available. The largest increases in real terms were recorded in Germany (9%) and Romania (8.7%).
Conversely, slight decreases of less than 1% were recorded in the Netherlands and France.
Collective agreements. As regards the second part, the report states that in 2023 Belgium and Italy had a collective bargaining coverage rate of 100%; six other Member States were above the 80% threshold, namely Austria (94.9%), Spain (91.8%), Finland (88.8%), Sweden (88%), Portugal (83.3%) and Denmark (81%). Below that threshold, more than half of all workers were covered by collective agreements in the Netherlands (72.6%), Slovenia (65.3%) and Luxembourg (57.3%).
Between one fifth and half of workers were covered in Germany (49.5%), the Czech Republic (42.4%), Latvia (31.6%), Malta (31%), Romania (28.0%), Slovakia (27%) and Cyprus (24.9%). Lastly, the lowest collective bargaining coverage rates, below 20%, were reported by Estonia (19.1%), Bulgaria (16.2%), Hungary (14.8%) and Poland (11.6%).
Croatia, France and Greece had not provided any data on this aspect.
Links to the documents: https://aeur.eu/f/n1i ; https://aeur.eu/f/n1k (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)