Starting Friday, you can expect to be paid more for your labour to keep up with Luxembourg’s rising prices for consumer goods.
Inflation during September triggered an increase of 2.5% for wages, salaries and pensions in Luxembourg that took effect on Friday, national statistics agency Statec said.
Linking wages increases to the the cost of living aims to preserve the purchasing power of workers, Economy Minister Franz Fayot tweeted shortly after the agency’s announcement.
“It is a mechanism that guarantees our social peace,” Fayot wrote.
Wages in Luxembourg are required to be increased every time prices for consumer goods and services jump by more than a certain threshold, normally 2.5%. The measure last kicked in at the start of 2020.
The inflation adjustment to salaries had been expected as of earlier this year to take effect in 2022, but Statec said in May that faster-than-expected price rises meant it would probably happen before the end of this year.
Consumer prices are on pace to increase by 2.7% this year, Statec said.
Inflation across the 19 countries that use the euro currency reached 3.4% in September, up from 3% in August, driven primarily by soaring energy prices, the EU’s Luxembourg-based statistical office Eurostat said on Friday. Consumer prices rose the most in Estonia at an estimated 6.4% and the least in Malta at 0.7%.
This is the seventh wage increase triggered by inflation in the last 10 years, said Marc Ferring, head of Statec’s price statistics unit. Such wage indexing has existed in Luxembourg for a century, starting with the salaries and pensions of railway employees and civil servants in 1921 and expanding in 1975 to all private and public wages, pensions and apprenticeship allowances, Ferring said.
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