Labour Market Outlook· Labour market Labour Market Outlook Q2 2024 Happy 25th birthday to the minimum wage 27 March 2024 by Nye Cominetti and Hannah Slaughter This year’s minimum wage uprating is large: roughly 1.6 million workers stand to benefit directly on 1 April when the adult rate rises to £11.44 – giving a cash increase of 9.8 per cent and a real-terms increase of 7.8 per cent. These are the third largest annual increases in the minimum wage’s history. 1 … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market Labour Market Outlook Q1 2024 29 January 2024 by Charlie McCurdy When comparing the pre-pandemic period to today, the national employment story has generally focused on the rise in inactivity due to ill health and the resultant fall in employment. However, in this note, we show that this is not the picture in all parts of the country. First, not everywhere has seen employment fall. Low-employment … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay Labour Market Outlook Q4 2023 What’s happening to pay growth? 12 December 2023 by Hannah Slaughter Over the course of 2023, the labour market has been gradually cooling on most measures. Even ignoring data from the Labour Force Survey that has recently been called into question, vacancies have been falling for 16 consecutive months and growth in payrolled employment has slowed. But nominal wage growth has remained resilient – even, since … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market Labour Market Outlook Q2 2023 14 August 2023 by Nye Cominetti and Nadim Hamdan and Hannah Slaughter The UK has seen more strikes in the past year than in any since the 1980s. These strikes have been concentrated in the public and transport sectors, where unionisation rates are highest. The public and public-funded sectors have seen a bigger pay hit than the private sector overall, but there are exceptions – highly unionised … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market Labour Market Outlook Q1 2023 6 April 2023 by Hannah Slaughter In recent months, labour market commentary has been dominated by the knock-on effects of the ongoing cost of living crisis. High inflation continues to erode real wages, despite strong nominal pay growth – and, in contrast to some policy makers’ fears that private sector wage growth could in itself drive prices higher, the latest evidence … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market Labour Market Outlook Q3 2022 6 October 2022 by Charlie McCurdy In the aftermath of the pandemic, the emergence of long Covid has increased focus on the relationship between work and ill health. But the prevalence of long Covid, thought to affect around 1 million workers, is lower than the pre-pandemic increase in the number of working-age disabled people (up by 2.3 million since 2013), with … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay Labour Market Outlook Q1 2022 How should we interpret strong nominal earnings growth? 9 April 2022 by Nye Cominetti and Karl Handscomb and Hannah Slaughter and Greg Thwaites In the first months of 2022, the labour market continued to tighten, with no sign of weakening in the aftermath of the JRS. Unemployment has fallen further, and stood at an almost-record low of 3.9 per cent in the three months to January 2022 – and although the Bank of England is concerned about unemployment … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market Labour Market Outlook Q4 2021 Wages and the cost of living in 2022 29 December 2021 by Torsten Bell and Adam Corlett and Jonathan Marshall and Hannah Slaughter The final three months of 2021 have been a mixed bag for the pandemic and the labour market. At the end of September, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (JRS) came to an end after 18 months – and the feared rise in unemployment does not seem to have come to pass. But the emergence of … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market Labour Market Outlook Q3 2021 Prospects for unemployment after the Job Retention Scheme 5 September 2021 by Hannah Slaughter and Greg Thwaites As the economy has continued to reopen over the summer, the labour market has continued to surprise on the upside. After peaking at 5.2 per cent in Q4 2020, the headline unemployment rate has continued to fall, reaching 4.7 per cent in Q2 2021 – and timelier, though more volatile, single-month data has the unemployment … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Pay Labour Market Outlook Q2 2021 Q2 2021 14 June 2021 by Hannah Slaughter As Covid-19 restrictions begin to ease and more sectors begin to reopen, there are positive signs of recovery in the labour market. The number of payrolled employees has begun to increase (although it is still 700,000 lower than it was in early 2020); furlough rates are falling; and vacancies have recovered to pre-crisis levels. Despite … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Pay Earnings Outlook Q1 2021 Earnings in the Covid-19 crisis 22 March 2021 by Hannah Slaughter The UK has spent the first quarter of 2021 under renewed restrictions to slow the spread of Covid-19. As the third England-wide lockdown began in January, many businesses were forced to close once again, and the number of jobs furloughed through the Job Retention Scheme (JRS) rose to 4.8 million. There is growing light at … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Pay Earnings Outlook Q4 2020 Public sector pay 21 December 2020 by Hannah Slaughter As we come to the end of a year like no other, the outlook for the labour market remains mixed. At the beginning of this month, the second national lockdown came to an end, non-essential retail and hospitality businesses (in most of the country) were allowed to reopen, and recent weeks have brought official approval … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Living Wage Earnings Outlook Q2 2020 Back in lockdown 8 November 2020 by Nye Cominetti As England enters its second lockdown the outlook for the labour market is as uncertain as at any point during the crisis (Wales and Northern Ireland are already in a second period of lockdown or tough restrictions, and restrictions in Scotland were increased a week ago). The story of recent weeks has been an accelerating … Continued READ MORE
Covid-19· Labour Market Outlook· Pay Earnings Outlook Q1 2020 What we know about how employee earnings have fared in the current crisis 16 July 2020 by Nye Cominetti and Laura Gardiner Since we last produced an Earnings Outlook (at the end of March) some things have become clearer. The scale of the impact of the current crisis is as big as was feared. This was already apparent then from the soaring claims for Universal Credit, but has since been confirmed by the 300-year-record fall in GDP, … Continued READ MORE
Covid-19· Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay Earnings Outlook Q4 2019 How should minimum wage policy respond to the current economic crisis? 28 March 2020 by Nye Cominetti and Karl Handscomb Usually in the Earnings Outlook we summarise the latest developments in pay and employment and use these to look forwards, with the trends moving slowly enough that the lag in our data is not too much of a problem. But with so much having changed so quickly, our normal indicators now serve as a guide … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay Earnings Outlook Q3 2019 27 December 2019 by Nye Cominetti and Jack Leslie Unlike our politics, 2019 was a year of strength and stability in the labour market – a year when employment reached and stayed at record highs and pay growth neared pre-recession levels. The most recent set of labour market data (for the three months to October) underlined this – the 16-64 employment rate ticked up … Continued READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Low pay· Pay The Resolution Foundation Earnings Outlook Q2 2019 7 November 2019 by Nye Cominetti and Jack Leslie In our Earnings Outlook for 2019 Q2 we suggest that the UK’s 12 year long pay squeeze may be about to come to an end, just in time for the election. But for many groups, typical pay is still well below its previous peak, READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Low pay· Pay Earnings Outlook Q1 2019 29 July 2019 by Nye Cominetti and Jack Leslie In our Earnings Outlook for 2019 Q1, we explore two big changes in the labour market over the past two decades: the rise in self-employment and the introduction and uprating of the minimum wage. Is there a connection between these trends? View all Earnings Outlooks. READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Low pay· Labour market· Pay The Resolution Foundation Earnings Outlook Q4 2018 30 March 2019 by Nye Cominetti Our quarterly earnings outlook, for Q4 2018. With the minimum wage now 20 years old, we chart its impact on low pay over two decades. We also look at the impact of the post-2016 increases, and prospects for the wage floor over the next few years. READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay The Resolution Foundation Earnings Outlook Q3 2018 6 February 2019 by Nye Cominetti Our quarterly earnings outlook, for Q3 2018. We look ahead to 2019, and ask whether recent improvements in pay growth will continue throughout the year (the view of the Bank of England) or will fall away (the view of the Office for Budget Responsibility). READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay The Resolution Foundation Earnings Outlook Q2 2018 13 November 2018 by Stephen Clarke and Nye Cominetti Our quarterly earnings outlook for Q2 2018. We focus on the decline in regional job mobility (people moving region for work) and argue that this is due to structural rather than cyclical trends – potentially due to the rise of remote working, and fewer people working in large firms with multiple locations. READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay The RF Earnings Outlook Q1 2018 2 August 2018 by Stephen Clarke Our quarterly earnings outlook, for Q1 2018. The outlook explores whether the current pace of wage growth is as good as it gets. Despite signs of improvement, annual growth in weekly wages is almost 1.5 percentage points lower than the pre-crisis average. READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay The RF Earnings Outlook Q4 2017 28 March 2018 by Stephen Clarke In Q4 2017 the pay squeeze for that year looked set to dissipate and employment rates continued to rise. But, taking a longer view, weaker than expected productivity growth suggests that the outlook for real pay growth is likely to remain subdued. READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay The RF Earnings Outlook Q3 2017 27 December 2017 by Stephen Clarke Our quarterly earnings outlook, for 2017 Q3. We argued that, just as the country’s politics were (/are!) in standstill due to Brexit, 2018 was likely to be a ‘standstill’ year on pay. READ MORE
Labour Market Outlook· Labour market· Pay Earnings Outlook Q2 2017 18 October 2017 by Stephen Clarke This Earnings Outlook looks at the second quarter of 2017. This was a period in which we saw the best and worst of the UK labour market. On the one hand, compared to a year earlier real pay fell by 0.5 per cent; yet on the other hand the unemployment rate hit a low not … Continued READ MORE
