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The squeeze on earnings continues

Alex Hurrell

The ONS 2012 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings release that came out this morning highlights that median real wages have fallen between 2010-11 and 2011-12. Median gross annual earnings for full-time employees were £26,500 for the tax year ending 5 April 2012, an increase of 1.4 percent from the previous year. But over the same period prices rose 4.8 percent according to the ONS’s Retail Price Index (RPI) measure. That implies that the earnings of a typical employee have actually fallen 3.2 percent in real terms. In fact, after accounting for inflation the median wage for full-time employees is now lower than it was in 1999-2000 (£26,900).

Matthew Whittaker

It’s a fairly obvious point that pay rises are connected to unemployment levels: the more people there are ready to step into work, the less scope employees have to push for higher wages. Of course the connection is not quite so straightforward in practice, and pay trends are affected by many more factors than unemployment alone. But data drawn over time and across countries points to a clear relationship.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the impact is more marked at the lower end of the earnings distribution than in the top half. This reflects the fact that the unemployed are more often drawn from the less skilled, meaning that they are closer substitutes for lower paid workers.

Giselle Cory

Benefits used to be uprated using RPI, a measure of price inflation. This changed to CPI last year. This is also a measure of prices, but crucially it runs lower than RPI. This move generated savings for the Treasury. It has also had an impact on living standards.

For the last few years the UK has been experiencing earnings growth far lower than price inflation (see chart). This has caused a squeeze on living standards. If the rumours are to be believed, it has also prompted the Treasury to ask if more savings can be found by uprating benefits against earnings growth instead of CPI.

Gavin Kelly

This post first appeared on Gavin Kelly's New Statesman blog.

Once in a while a policy moves from being partisan and divisive to representing the mainstream consensus in a very short period of time. That is, or at least was, the case with the national minimum wage (NMW). It wasn’t so long ago it was denigrated by much of the business community and the then Conservative opposition - but only a few years later it acquired a very different status as a statement of the bleeding obvious. The result, according to a timely new report by Professor Alan Manning, is that it has ‘settled down into a premature staid middle age’ following a noisy infancy without ever having passed through a teenage rebellion.

James Plunkett

This post appeared on the OECD Insights blog

Do workers reap the benefits of productivity growth? Few questions are more central to the conundrum of faltering living standards. If the 20^th century was a golden era for material wellbeing in Britain, that’s explained by one factor above all others: from 1900 to 2000 UK labour productivity grew roughly fourfold, translating into unprecedented growth in real earned income.

Of all the findings from our recent work at the Resolution Foundation, then, few are more worrying than those that suggest a weakening

Why Britain's households got richer - and why they stopped

Gavin Kelly

This post first appeared on Gavin Kelly's New Statesman blog.

Before there is any prospect of shaking the economic pessimism that has engulfed the country we need first to alight upon a credible account of how working families will boost their living standards in the years ahead.

At the moment no-one is mapping out this course to a more prosperous future; but more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that we don't really know how it is that households got richer over the recent past.

The Breakdown in the Relationship Between Economic Growth and Pay

Matthew Whittaker

This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post

With the fragile recovery in the global economy at very real risk of derailment, strategies for growth remain at the top of agendas across the world. But if we look at the period prior to the crisis of 2008-09, it becomes clear that we need to aim to do more than simply return to 'normal'.

Long before the downturn, there was evidence to suggest that increases in GDP were failing to feed through to broad-based improvements in living standards in a range of advanced economies: for too many ordinary workers, 'growth' no longer led automatically to 'gain'. Although the causes of this breakdown in relationship are many and varied, at their heart lays growing wage inequality.

Squeezed households will need higher wages

James Plunkett

This article originally appeared on the Prospect blog.

While Libya takes the spotlight, the British economy wheezes in the dark. Monday’s survey from Markit showed household finances worsening at their fastest rate since early 2009. Yesterday, a new poll from the Resolution Foundation confirmed that picture. Half of all low-to-middle income households say they’re running out of cash each month; only one in four are making regular savings. Many households now face the unenviable choice between cutting their spending still further and increasing their borrowing. Needless to say, at the national level, neither option translates into a promising path to recovery.

Low growth implications for living standards particularly bleak

James Plunkett

This blog originally appeared on Left Foot Forward

This morning’s weak Q2 stats (pdf) would be worrying in any recovery. But in the aftermath of such a deep fall in output their implications for real trends in living standards are particularly bleak. The UK economy still has a long way to climb back to pre-recession levels of output. Chart 1 below (now updated from a recent post to include Q2 stats) puts the scale of the task in perspective.