Making up lost ground on pay
What is happening to workers’ pay is becoming one of the central arguments in the run up to the general election with the Government making much of the latest statistics on earnings and inflation.
Alastair Hatchett's Articles
New pay developments in 2013: discussions on pay at the 6th TUC-IDS Pay Forum
Since the recession began in 2008, real incomes have gone into reverse. Inflation has eroded the purchasing power of wages and salaries. Pay rises have rarely matched the inflation rate in the private sector and the austerity incomes policy imposed by the Government on the public sector has shrunk the real value of wages. Meanwhile,…
King’s Speech: Bank Governor highlights 12% cut in take home pay
In an astonishingly frank speech yesterday, Mervyn King explained that high inflation had squeezed real take-home pay by 12% over the last few years. And this was on the day we learned that the economy had shrunk by 0.5% in the final quarter of 2010. Mervyn King also said that he expects CPI inflation to…
Earnings growth of 2.1% while inflation heads for 5%
Average weekly earnings grew at 2.1% in the year to November 2010 while RPI inflation hit 4.8% in December, the month before VAT rises to 20%. This means that over the course of 2010 most employees have seen a reduction of nearly 3 percentage points in the value of their earnings. Figures from the Office…
Inflation moves higher even before VAT rise to 20%
Higher petrol, diesel, gas and food prices drove inflation higher in December 2010, even before the rate of VAT was raised to 20% at the beginning of January 2011. The Retail Prices Index (RPI) rose to 4.8% in December, up from 4.7% in November. The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose to 3.7%, up from 3.3%…
The use and abuse of earnings data
The detail of what has been happening to pay and the outlook for the coming year will be discussed in detail at the IDS/TUC pay conference on 16 February. It is a strange logic that concludes that a financial crisis that started in the top echelons of banking should be resolved by freezing the pay…