The incomes of ordinary workers would be far higher today if the share of national spent on wages was the same as it was in the late 1970s. To find out how much you would have been paid if the ‘wage output’ ratio hadn’t been falling for 30 years, we’ve made this incomes tracker tool. Type in your salary and see how much you would be earning today – and how much of a pay cut you’ve in effect taken.

Furthermore, the richest in society have taken an ever greater slice of the UK’s dwindling earnings pie. The lowest fifth of earners have seen their wage share fall seven times faster than the richest fifth. Meanwhile those at the very top received rapid pay rises that outstripped inflation, growth and the performance of the companies they run.

In the past our shrinking wage pool has been papered over by strong economic growth, a housing boom and rising credit card bills. But we can’t rely on more personal debt to get us out of trouble again.

Download the full report (pdf)

The falling ‘wage output’ ratio presents a massive challenge for the UK and needs to be addressed. Consumer spending is a huge driver of growth and we can’t build a sustainable economic recovery off the back of people getting poorer. More collective wage bargaining, better skills training and a fairer distribution of wealth are some of the recommendations the TUC makes in our latest Touchstone Extra pamphlet published today: All in this Together.

Every year the TUC number crunches the amount of unpaid overtime worked by employees across the UK and calculates at what point of the year they would effectively start getting paid if they did all their unpaid hours from the first of January.

The effective pay date for 2012 is Friday 24th February and we’ve named it in Work Your Proper Hours Day in honour of the five million workers who give the economy a huge – but often unrecognised – boost by regularly doing unpaid overtime.

British workers are constantly being attacked for being late, pulling sickies or not pulling their weight, often off the back of spurious surveys commissioned by organisations desperate for publicity.

Work Your Proper Hours Day points out that in actual fact workers are very committed to their jobs and often go that extra mile to help their employer out. It’s high time we started celebrating what’s good about the work we do, rather than selling ourselves short.

This year the TUC has calculated that the two billion hours of unpaid overtime worked last year is equivalent to a million full-time jobs. We’re not saying that cutting out unpaid overtime would create a million jobs. Frankly, a lot of those unpaid hours are simply a result of a culture of pointless presenteeism where staff judged on the hours spent at their desk rather than the work they do. Cutting out those unnecessary hours would save staff and businesses a lot of time.

But there are a small number of employers who routinely overwork staff, don’t pay them for the extra hours worked and take the extra profit instead. This kind of attitude can be bad for workers’ health and can hold back job creation.

What we need are smarter working practises to give staff a better work-life balance and boost productivity, which will hopefully make it easier for employers to grow and recruit new staff.

If you want to celebrate Work Your Proper Hours Day in your work on 24th February there’ll be information, advice, posters and quizzes available from WorkYourProperHoursDay.com in the coming weeks.

My personal hunch is that this is because it ticks a number of boxes. Scrapping EMA is a) irrational – as the IFS has pointed out EMA has improved education attainment and supported social moblity, b) unfair – it’s targeted at those on low incomes and c) it’s current and fits in with the general anger over how funding for young people’s education has been cut so savagely.

Oh, and the government promised not to scrap it before the election but let’s face it, the promise to keep EMA is hardly the first one that’s been broken of late.

There’s still plenty of time to vote for you least favourite cut if you think there are worse examples out there.

Touchstone Blog is getting in on the act with the launch of CUTS Factor, which we’ll be running between now and Christmas. But this is a top ten list with a twist – rather than picking your favourite cut, we’re asking you to pick your worst from a shortlist of ten. Think X Factor with ten Wagners.

The cuts we’ve chosen cover ten different areas (see more detail on the contenders). These aren’t necessarily our most hated cuts – we’d have trouble restricting such a list to ten. After all, our regular Cuts Watch series is well over 300 now and the recent local authorities’ settlement alone will mean tens of thousands of local cuts across the UK.

There’s no set criteria for picking your worst cut. It may be because it relates to an issue close to your heart, it could be the nastiness of the cut or it could be the sheer stupidity of it. We’ve always argued at touchstone that the cuts are a false economy because they will choke off growth, restrict people’s job prospects and jeopardise consumer and business confidence – the very things that are needed to get our economy motoring and the tax take up again.

I’m sure there will be some people out there who would genuinely like to vote for their favourite cut. Christmas really has come early for those wanting a smaller state, with mothers staying at home and private companies running those public services that haven’t been abandoned altogether. In the spirit of fairness, I have suggested a cut that I’d support – and one that I think most voters would too.

Bankers bonuses

The blame for the global financial crash – and the subsequent taxpayers’ bailout that has led to a record deficit – lies squarely with the banks and financial institutions. Fuelled by reckless bonus incentives that encouraged dangerous risk taking, they created the financial bubble that burst spectacularly in 2007.

You’d assume then that action would have been taken to prevent this from ever happening again. A cut in the level of bonuses – estimated to be around £7 billion this year in the City alone – or a Robin Hood Tax on financial transactions could be used to recapitalise banks, payback the deficit or lend to businesses to get the economy moving again.

Instead, a few predictable threats to move to Switzerland appear to have scared the government away from doing anything to rein in bankers’ behaviour. This would have been a cut we could have all supported. Sadly, everyone else is being made to pay for the mistakes the banks made.

As an ordinary taxpayer I should probably take their analysis more seriously, though I shudder to think that anyone in the Government does.

The stand out finding in this analysis is the Government’s woeful performance – 0 out of 5 – for its lack of progress in scrapping the 50p tax rate. Is a tax rate applicable only to those earning over £150,000 – the top two per cent of earners – really an issue for ordinary taxpayers? I can’t imagine I’ll ever earn anything like that figure, though of course if I did the first I’d hear about it would probably be from a Taxpayers alliance press release.

To be fair to the Government, I think they deserve more than 0 out of 5 on this performance target. In these tough economic times, with subsidised childcare schemes, free school meals, school rebuilding programmes and job guarantees for young people out of work all being cut, the Government has still found time to launch a consultation on pension annuities that would only benefit the super-rich. That’s surely worth a point.

My favourite finding however is the section on transparency. The TPA is of course right to call for more transparency in the Government’s decision making. I’d be particularly interested to see the Treasury conduct and publish a distributional impact analysis on its spending decisions – a Fairness Test if you like. I’m sure ordinary taxpayers would also to find out more about how their money is being spent on Private Finance Initiatives, though I doubt the TPA would support this call, given where their funding comes from.

But can there be a better example of the pot calling the kettle black than a secretly funded think-tank such as the Taxpayers Alliance campaigning for transparency?