The Spanish labor market is experiencing a statistical mirage. While the Government and macroeconomic indicators celebrate record numbers of Social Security affiliation (22.1 million people), the reality in homes is one of financial asphyxiation.
The rise in housing and food prices has completely devoured the salary increases of recent decades, consolidating a transfer of income from work to the real estate and energy sectors. But the conclusion is alarming: having a job in Spain no longer guarantees a decent life, but, in many cases, constant survival.
“We are in a society that lives on the edge of the abyss”
The data presented by the Unión Sindical Obrera (USO) union reveal a true social fracture. Since 2008, while salaries have grown by 31.6%, the cost of food has skyrocketed by 54.3%. This difference of more than 20 percentage points means that filling the shopping basket is now a luxury for a good part of the active population.
However, the USO report highlights that this asphyxiation has not been gradual, but has concentrated violently in the last five years. In the period between 2021 and 2025, Spain has entered a dynamic of hyperinflation where food prices have skyrocketed by 45.3%. This increase is almost triple that of salaries in the same period, which barely increased by 17.33%, leaving families with no room for maneuver in the face of rising prices.
Joaquín Pérez, general secretary of USO, denounces that “there is a gap of 20 points of loss of real purchasing power in eating compared to work.” According to the union leader, society faces what he calls the “tyranny of rigid expenses”, those inevitable outlays that households cannot reduce.
“Today a worker dedicates the vast majority of his day and his salary just to have a roof over his head and light. It is an obvious imbalance that promotes inequalities and the increase in poverty,” says Pérez.
“There are people who want to have housing and can’t even joke.”
If food is a concern, access to shelter terrifies the working class. The data revealed in the hearing are devastating and certify that between 2015 and 2025 the price of housing nationwide has almost doubled, with an increase of 106% in new construction and 75% in used housing.
Concepción Iniesta, head of USO in the Community of Madrid, provides a very critical vision of the unsustainable pressure in the capital by warning that “from 2014 to 2025, housing in Madrid has increased by 110% and second-hand housing by 117%.”
The union spokesperson highlights that real estate costs have doubled in a suffocating manner while workers’ salaries have remained stagnant well below those parameters.
This relentless price escalation means that the 20% of households with the least income now have to allocate 60% of their budget exclusively to paying for housing and food. For this fifth part of society, achieving a savings cushion is a true utopia right now.
Added to this utopia is the silent drama of single-person households, one of the study’s major warning points. By having to assume unavoidable expenses such as rent or bills alone, people who live alone have become the group most exposed to economic vulnerability. Over the last decade, its level of basic spending has increased by 24.2%. A financial burden that becomes even more suffocating for single-parent families, since if they have dependent minors, this increase in spending is close to 27%.
The precariousness “made up” by statistics
The report, published this Wednesday, April 22, focuses on the low quality of current employment and denounces that the latest labor reform has not eradicated instability, but has simply hidden it behind new contractual formulas.
Despite the historical record of Social Security affiliations, the union warns about the statistical mirage of discontinuous permanent contracts and the extreme volatility of the market. Joaquín Pérez is blunt about this and demands that “the labor reform has to really define what a contract is.”
The Secretary General recalls that of the 15 million contracts signed last year “no one can believe that 8 or 9 million were real indefinite contracts”, regretting that if this were true, unemployment would have already disappeared in Spain.
Far from the triumphalism of the official figures, the union estimates that there are millions of people in a bureaucratic limbo. This group includes citizens who do not appear as pure unemployed in the statistics, but who in reality lack effective work activity.
Towards a “humanization” of employment: May 1, mass mobilization
Faced with this scenario of suffocation, the union organization calls for a large mass mobilization for the next May Day under the motto ‘Humanize employment’. Sara García, Secretary of Trade Union Action and Employment, highlights the need to recover combativeness in collective bargaining.
The union official confesses that “when it comes to achieving minimum wage increases to maintain purchasing power, a lot of conflict is needed because salary review clauses are the first issue that employers want to avoid.”
The roadmap proposed by the spokespersons involves demanding a brutal public investment in housing, guaranteeing a shield for the prices of basic products through a super-reduced VAT and applying a profound change to the productive model that focuses on research and industry over the service sector.
The summary of this national emergency is perfectly reflected in the words of the Madrid representative when she concluded that “employment cannot be just a statistical data, it has to serve to live better, not to survive worse.”