92% of workers with the right to an agreement in Spain are already covered by one
Collective bargaining agreements establish the rules of the labor game for the majority of workers and employers. Within these agreements, essential aspects of the working life, such as basic salaries, working hours, and vacations, are defined. However, the exact number of people covered by these agreements has been unclear until now. To address this, the Ministry of Labor recently released a statistic revealing that 92% of workers with the right to collective bargaining are already covered by an agreement.
This amounts to 14,069,031 “employment relationships” – a term that is not entirely synonymous with workers, as it includes a small percentage of moonlighting. The figures published by the Ministry of Labor only represent the proportion of employees with an agreement compared to those who are eligible for one. As a result, self-employed individuals, civil servants, statutory staff, senior officials, members of cooperatives, and those in the social economy (about three million people in total) are excluded from this analysis.
The remaining 8% who are not covered by any agreement, despite having the right to one, consist mainly of domestic employees. The challenge they face in reaching agreements is due to the absence of an employer association that represents the families who employ them. Consequently, they are effectively excluded from collective bargaining, with the provisions of the Workers’ Statute being directly applied to them.
At the sector level, coverage of collective bargaining agreements exceeds 85% in almost all industries. The only exceptions are public administration and defense (with a coverage rate of 62.4%) and activities related to households employing domestic staff and producing goods and services for personal use (with a coverage rate of 5.8%). The latter category, which includes domestic workers, has a coverage rate of only 0.2% for women and around 48% for men. This discrepancy is due to the inclusion of doormen, maintenance staff, and surveillance personnel in neighboring communities within this category. Conversely, sectors with the highest coverage rates include hospitality (98.7%), construction (98.4%), and financial activities (98.3%).
The coverage of collective bargaining agreements also reveals a significant gender gap. While 95% of men are covered by such agreements, the percentage drops to 88.25% for women. This disparity is most pronounced in the services sector, where coverage among men is six percentage points higher than that among women.
At the regional level, the picture remains quite similar. The communities with the highest coverage percentages are Murcia (95.5%), Catalonia (94%), Valencian Community (93.4%), Castilla y León (93.1%), Aragón (92.9%), La Rioja (91.9%), and Madrid (91.9%). The following regions also have high coverage rates: Andalusia (91.8%), Asturias (91.6%), Castilla-La Mancha (91.3%), the Canary Islands (91.1%), Galicia (89.6%), Cantabria (89.2%), and the Balearic Islands (88.7%).
The three autonomous communities with the lowest protection rates in terms of collective bargaining coverage are Extremadura (87.4%), the Basque Country (85.7%), and Navarra (82.7%). In the case of the Basque Country and Navarra, the abundance of unions and employer ecosystems may play a role. In these regions, workers and companies often negotiate agreements outside the scope of traditional collective bargaining.