Croatia is the only 'new' EU country in which salaries are lower now than in 2010, before the crisis, a union report said on Monday (March 19).

According to the Benchmarking Working Europe 2018 research, and cited by the Union of Autonomous Trade Unions of Croatia (SSSH), the average salary, in real terms, fell by 7.9 percent in the period from 2010 to 2017.

The only EU countries scoring worse than Croatia are Greece, Cyprus and Portugal, while the so-called ‘new’ members recorded a double-digit salary growth – in the Czech Republic it was 11 percent, in Poland 15.3 percent, in Romania 30 percent, in and Bulgaria a whopping 54.5 percent, said SSSH.

Although salaries rose between 2016 and 2017 by 1.2 percent, the increase was not enough to make up for the significant drop during the crisis, and are now significantly below pre-crisis levels, when salaries rose 15.8 percent between 2000 and 2009, SSSH said.