It will hardly surprise anyone to know that inequalities exist between white-collar workers, who represent office workers as a whole, and blue-collar workers, associated with manual and other manual workers. Recently, the Chambre des Salariés pointed out the fact that around a third of people who earn the unskilled minimum social wage in Luxembourg are over 45 and have worked for many years. This was particularly the case in the cleaning and catering sectors.
This time, the study carried out by the Chamber of Employees provides a complete and quantified analysis of the phenomenon, particularly in terms of worker remuneration.
In March 2022, 55.5% of the almost 66,000 employees paid near the SSM, for minimum social wage, were blue-collar workers. “Thus, they are the majority within the SSM neighborhood while they only represent a little more than one in three employees within the total Luxembourg economy,” notes the Chamber of Employees. If it is therefore obvious that blue-collar workers are over-represented within the population in the vicinity of the SSM, this over-representation diverges when we speak of qualified or unskilled SSM.
An obvious inequality
Indeed, with regard to the unskilled minimum wage (SSM-NQ), the over-representation of blue-collar workers is significantly higher than near the skilled minimum wage (SSM-Q). In the first, 61.5% of employees are blue-collar workers, or 72% more than their weight in the employed population (25.8 percentage points) justifies. In the second, the qualified, the over-representation is limited to 32%: 47.3% of SSM-Q employees are blue-collar workers, compared to a weight of 35.7% in the total population.
By studying the proportion of paid employees in the vicinity of the SSM, this inequality between blue-collar and white-collar workers becomes more evident. In March 2022, 23.3% of blue-collar workers are paid near SSM, compared to 10.4% of white-collar workers. More precisely, 15% of blue-collar workers are in the SSM-NQ, almost three times more than white-collar workers who are there in 5.2% of cases.
The Chamber of Employees tempers, however, ensuring that if inequalities are strong in 2022, they were more so in 2012. “Between 2012 and 2022, the SSM rate increased faster among white-collar workers than among blue-collar workers, thus implying a reduction in the over-representation of the latter.”
Inequalities depending on the sector of activity…
Furthermore, these inequalities between blue-collar and white-collar workers vary depending on the sector of activity. While in the construction sector, the overall SSM rate is only 15% higher for blue-collar workers than for white-collar workers (10.9% versus 12.6%), in the “miscellaneous services” sector », the overall rate for blue-collar workers is three times the rate for white-collar workers (8.6% versus 26%).
© PHOTO: CSL
The largest relative gap concerns the financial and insurance activities sector where 06% of white-collar workers are in the vicinity of the SSM-NQ while there are 3.9% among blue-collar workers in the same sector, i.e. 5. 3 times more often. In absolute terms, inequality at the SSM-NQ level is particularly significant in the Horeca and in the miscellaneous services sector where the SSM-NQ rates of blue-collar workers exceed those of white-collar workers by 15.1 and 19 points respectively. percentage.
… but also like
We must also note that almost a third (31%) of blue-collar women are paid near the SSM, including three-quarters at the SSM-NQ. Among blue-collar men this rate is 10.8 percentage points lower and amounts to only 20.2%. This considerably lower rate for men is exclusively explained by a lower rate of SSM-NQ, the proportion of blue-collar workers in SSM-Q being almost identical for men as for women.
At the white-collar level, the inequalities between men and women are less with regard to the rate of employees paid on the SSM, but they remain significant. Indeed, the proportion of white-collar women near the SSM is, at 12.5%, almost 50% higher than the proportion of men near the SSM (8.5%). Overall DFS rates are split equally between SSM-NQ and SSM-Q for both men and women.
© PHOTO: CSL
The over-representation of blue-collar workers is, in March 2022, slightly greater among women than among men. Indeed, the SSM rate of blue-collar workers is 2.5 times higher than that of white-collar workers among women while among men this factor rises to 2.4. Since 2012 this over-representation has nevertheless been decreasing; the drop being, however, less steep among women (from 2.9 to 2.5) than among men (from 3.3 to 2.4).
