Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Announces 30 Percent Raise Of Minimum Wage

Venezuelan workers who make the minimum wage will see their salaries go up on May 1, when Venezuela celebrates Labor Day, after president Nicolás Maduro announced a 30 percent increase in the national minimum salary. Employees who previously made 3,270 bolivars per month ($520) will now make 4,251, or about $657. El Universal notes that the presidential decree marks the second adjustment in mandatory salaries to be put into effect this year, after Maduro raised minimum wages 10 percent in January.

The decrees are a response to spiraling inflation, which in 2013 reached 56.2 percent, according to official figures. Last week, Venezuela’s central bank said inflation in March had sped up to 4.1 percent, from 2.4 percent in February, and blamed protests staged by the opposition in cities across the country. Maduro himself has frequently pointed the finger at speculators for the high inflation rates and shortages of basic goods, and in November the country’s national assembly passed a law giving him expanded powers to decree price controls and set profit limits for businesses.

BBC notes that the wage hikes still aren’t enough to keep up with inflation. Opposition leader Henrique Capriles, who narrowly lost to Maduro in last April’s presidential elections, criticized it as “chucuto” or insufficient and suggested he disagreed with the government’s approach to managing the economy. “We have a government which calls itself a defender of the poor, but all of its economic measures hit the poor man hardest,” he said. “Right now, almost everything consumed in Venezuela is imported, and this generates gigantic spending, which has been affected because there aren’t enough dollars to sustain the situation. So when demand is greater than supply, products become scarce and prices go up.”