With May 1 approaching, uncertainty reigns and expectations grow as to whether the “responsible” announcement by the government in charge will be made through the real structure of the Pyrrhic minimum wage or whether the bonus will be maintained, with greater relevance, as a tool to improve workers’ income. A third scenario is if a “hybrid” formula is used to adjust remuneration, according to experts consulted.
An increase in the minimum wage is imperative, which It has been “frozen” since March 2022 in Bs. 130, a demand made by the country’s labor sectors as an important step to advance in a clear direction of political and social stability.
Lawyer León Arismendi, professor of Labor Law at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), explains that the only bonus that has legal basis and applies to both public and private sector workers is the so-called Socialist Ticket Basket.
“While the “Economic War bonus” is an invention to evade the impact on legal and conventional benefits,” in public administration. He considers that now, with part of the sanctions removed, the correct thing is for it to be incorporated into the salary, he said.
For his part, economist Adán D’ Lima, academic at the National Experimental University of the Western Plains Ezequiel Zamora (Unellez), believes that “the government has not weighed, and must do so, the current historical social impact of the announcement of a pyrrhic salary without impact on the cost of the basic food basket, moving further and further away from the constitutional precepts, referring to a decent and sufficient salary.”
D’ Lima maintains that “the limited financial issue in a real economy destroyed or devastated by the deliberate induction of poorly applied economic policies in the country, morally supports the salary adjustment. “However, the situation of the real economic fabric requires a profound transformation to reactivate the productive apparatus that helps boost growth and, consequently, the general productivity that is so much needed to generate the fiscal resources that sponsor the leverage of social investment without the need to resort to multilateral organizations,” although at this time This support is necessary to achieve macroeconomic stabilization, he said.
In Arismendi’s opinion, salary financing should be done with recurring income (from oil, for example) and not with the issuance of “inorganic money” by the Central Bank.
He insisted that agreements with the International Monetary Fund, as a general rule, do not include the payment of salaries and wages.
D’Lima agrees that a commensurate and fair salary must be achieved that complies with article 91 of the Constitution, and is financed by national economic activity.
“This starts with giving signs of confidence to the national and international private sector, which demands a legal framework that protects capital in order to provide guarantees of protection to this flow of resources in foreign currency that will help stabilize the exchange market, inflation and a rising real salary,” the economist said.
From the Tripartite to the unilateral formula, a necessary context
Arismendi recalled that in the reform of the Organic Labor Law (LOT) of 1997, a Tripartite Commission was established, made up of representative organizations of workers, employers and the National Executive, whose specific task was to review the minimum wage, “at least once a year” and taking as a reference, among other variables, the cost of the food basket.
Said Commission, he pointed out, was given a period of 30 days, counted from the date of its installation in the month of January, to approve a recommendation from which the National Executive would set the minimum wage. This was done in 1997, 1998 and 1999.
The variables that were used in those periods, in addition to the food basket, were the estimated inflation for the corresponding year, fiscal spending, exchange rate parity, the needs of workers, the productivity of companies and the competitiveness of the country compared to its neighbors in the Andean community, pointed out the director of the Institute of Higher Trade Union Studies (Inaesin).
In December 1999, the current Constitution was approved, in whose article 91 it was established that the State must guarantee a “minimum living wage that will be adjusted each year taking as a reference the cost of the basic basket.” Except for the change from the food basket to the basic one, the National Executive had the obligation to apply the aforementioned provisions of the LOT.
However, Arismendi added, starting in 2000, the government of then-President Hugo Chávez stopped convening the Tripartite Commission and dedicated itself to setting the minimum wage unilaterally.
Then, in 2012, the current Decree Law, Organic Law of Labor, Men and Women Workers (LOTTT) was approved, which suppressed the tripartite dialogue for setting the minimum wage and instead ordered that the National Executive carry out a broad consultation to know “the opinions of the different social organizations and institutions on socioeconomic matters.”
Based on said norm, Nicolás Maduro set the minimum wage on countless occasions without any effective consultation with organizations other than the Central Bolivariana.
In 2022, in response to the Report of the Commission of Inquiry of the International Labor Organization (ILO), a National Dialogue Forum was established, with the support of technical staff of said organization, made up of representatives of the National Executive, employers’ organizations and various workers’ confederations.
The purpose of said forum, among others, is to define the method for setting the minimum wage, but with this no progress was made because “the inputs that the Government must provide (cost of the food basket, inflation estimate, exchange rate policy, fiscal expenditure, cost of public payroll) are either not presented or the information is opaque,” said Arismendi, legal consultant for the Association of UCV Professors (APUCV).
In 2024, the union organizations (Confederation of Venezuelan Workers-CTV, General Confederation of Labor -CGT, Alianza Sindical -ASI) with the support of the APUCV, proposed that the minimum wage be set at the equivalent in bolivars of $200, as a starting point for a salary policy that includes periodic adjustments, he said.
Minimum wage in 200 dollars
For the labor expert, currently the minimum wage should be set at that equivalent in bolivars ($200) “as the starting point of a salary policy that provides for periodic adjustments in accordance with the price of the dollar set by the BCV, along with the implementation of an anti-inflationary program.”
He recalled that this was the approximate amount of the minimum wage in 1999, when a barrel of oil was a little more than 10 dollars.
Some spokespersons from the business sector have taken up the issue of the retroactivity of social benefits, as an obstacle to undertaking this change, to which León responds that “according to current law, each quarter employers must pay 15 days of salary into the company’s accounting or into a trust fund as a “guarantee of social benefits.”
“To this are added 2 days of salary, for each year, cumulative up to 30. The payment of benefits must be made at the end of the employment relationship, at which time the employer must compare the accumulated sum with the amount resulting from multiplying the worker’s last monthly salary by his seniority. This is the so-called retroactivity or recalculation that only applies when the employment relationship ends,” Arismendi added.
Now, he argues that inflation, currency devaluation and salary bonuses turned social benefits into nothing. Employers, after inflation took hold, have been paying benefits in negligible amounts.
With the current minimum wage (0.26 cents on the dollar) “retroactivity is a mirage. It is the workers who have carried the weight of the crisis on their shoulders. It is unusual that the intention is to condition the salary adjustment to an unknown change in legislation,” stated Arismendi.
“The level that we all expect and deserve”
For Professor D’Lima, the issue of the May 1 announcement is one of credibility. “To say that there is no possibility of increasing salaries to the level that we all expect and deserve does not fit into the current historical moments. The squandering of public funds in a grotesque and obscene manner are not viable and objective arguments that allow us to support the announcement of a pyrrhic salary due to lack of resources, given the lack of credibility in the public management applied for many years.”
In this sense, the government does not have it easy on May 1, with a population in a situation of extreme poverty for many years, without salary adjustment since March 2022, with accumulated inflation that closed 2025 at 475.28% and accumulated inflation in 2026 of 71.8% and annualized inflation at the end of March 2026 649.5%, the economist noted.
Given this panorama, he considers that there is no argument for not increasing the salary, which in his opinion is crucial that this happens to prevent the social cost from continuing to rise, “not only due to a people that has been without adjustment for years, but because of the debacle that exists in areas such as education and health that put the future of the country at stake,” he said.
“Hybrid” thesis on the increase in the minimum wage
Although the scope of the government announcement of May 1 is unknown, some public and private entities have been insisting that the increase will be a combined scheme: an advance in the minimum wage and the bonus.
Adán D’ Lima, master in economics and union member, said that although there is nothing official, the thesis of an increase with a range that can be between $50 or $150 of minimum wage and the rest in bonus, that is, “a hybrid” is being handled.
However, he said that calculations are being made regarding a possible sacrifice of the public payroll, which represents a high political cost for the interim government.
The idea is that “the degree of inflation is not affected and progressive increases in the minimum wage are made throughout the year, depending on the flow of foreign currency from oil exports,” he said.
In recent hours, econometric models have been running, which validate theories with real data, to determine how far we can advance so as not to affect the economy, emphasized a source linked to the private sector.
