The TUC has reported this morning that:
- Real wages still below 2008 level in 212 out of 340 UK local authorities
- TUC says longest pay squeeze in modern era is a “damning indictment” of the Conservatives' economic record
- Wage performance in every corner of Britain is well below historic trends, analysis shows
- Average UK worker would be £200 a week better off if real wages had grown at pre-crisis rate
This table shows the distribution of local authority areas where real wages have not grown:
As they note, this data can be compared with that for the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, covering 34 countries:
OECD data on wages is based on national accounts rather than the type of earnings survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics that is used in this analysis. It is not as accurate as the ONS survey, but it allows for comparisons between countries, as some nations do not conduct earnings surveys in the same way as the ONS. Under this approach, the UK shows a very small improvement in real wages from pre-financial crisis peak in 2007 to 2022 (the most recent year for which data for international comparisons is available). And it shows that the UK is in 27th place out of 34 OECD nations for wage growth across this period.
So, we are lagging behind in wage terms. Any growth is going to the richest and is not being shared, which is how the views are reconciled. That means that the elite are getting it all their own way. And it is very clear that it is that same elite that Labour now intends to serve.
But the TUC is not saying that. Why not, I wonder?
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Are the upper echelon of the TUC part of that elite?
They are too keen to be close to Labour for their member’s own good, I would suggest
Thank you, Richard.
Your last paragraph reminds me of my first stint as a banking lobbyist, either side of the GFC. So often, insider sympathisers would tip off the TUC and ETUC, provide talking points / learning materials, suggest events etc., but they were not interested. Sucking up to Labour, even when Labour politicians in London and Brussels were throwing themselves at the feet of big finance, was more important.
Argggggg!
The unfairness makes me so angry.
What are the Welsh, Scottish and N.Irish figures for Table 1
I don’t know – I used all I had
I find it interesting that the West Midands and the North East are the 2 regions with the lowest % of authorities where wages are below the 2008 level. I would suggest that may be because the 2008 wages in those areas were extremely low, not that they have enjoyed better wages than the rest of the country.
Entirely correct – baseline obviously matters here
It’s called levelling down.
Today the ‘Telegraph’ has decided that Britain needs to “reindustrialise to compete”. The Telegraph, who will of course take no responsibility for the guff and ignorant economic propaganda it has been peddling for decades in support of the politics that has shoehorned us into the economic mess we are in, bereft of industry; are just the intellectually challenged chumps we will turn to first, when it all goes wrong.
Ironically, Nick Timothy, who wrote the piece following some hasty right-wing damascene conversion; an epiphany on the Telegraph’s well-trodden road to nowhere; chooses to make the argument based on international comparisons; just the sort of comparison the ONS and other deadweight box tickers make so difficult to do with UK wage data (try GERS, if you really don’t wish to understand any comparable facts at all, with any country in the world). Irony? We industrialised so that we are dependent on the rest of the world for almost everything; but with an economy that has an endemic, incurable, permanent balance of payments deficit. The only thing we produce is ….. money. And according to the Conservatives and the Telegraph, we can’t afford to make that either. You work it out.
You couldn’t make it up? The Telegraph has been making up this tripe for decades; and we are in this mess, because sufficient people in Britain are stupid enough to believe the Telegraph – voted for it, and show little sign they have learned anything.
“We deindustrialised so that we are dependent on the rest of the world for almost everything; but with an economy that has an endemic, incurable, permanent balance of payments deficit. ”
I missed the “de-” in “deindustrialised”. Reading the Telegraph, even momentarily does dreadful things with your head.
Thanks Mr Warren, you raised my spirits. Most amusing.
Torygraph readers would seem to be similar to the Bourbons: forgot nothing, learned nothing.
Ditto the funny (peculiar) people that write for it.
BTW: if you think the imbeciles that read the Torygraph are dim – wrt economics etc – my discussions with a German lady last Sat suggest that even a basic understanding of macro-economics and the funding of governments is almost wholly absent in most of the population EU (I lost it when she said “Venezuela”).
The core problem? they ain’t curious.
Agreed to all that
My father read the Torygraph throughout his life. We didn’t always see eye-to-eye.
I have said it before but….
Again it would not cost labour anything (OK, not quite but) to increase the minimum wage & include things like higher rates for ‘non contractual’ hours nights, evenings and weekends, Also some sorts of jobs eg Care, Hospitality, driving etc as they are not hard to define
Not only that but it would reduce the benefits bill
Agreed
As I work in Benefits we have been commenting on the growth of ‘in work’ benefit claims & expenditure something that doesnt seem to concern The Government, unlike the (alleged) growth in ‘Sickness’ claims
Now following on from my earlier point I suggest that as a longer term plan there needs to be some sort of Government target for average earnings both nationally and by area with ‘disincentives’ to discourage business models that rely on low pay
How about deducting from the profits on which dividends are based all in work benefit payments that have been made to employees? Only for the dividend calculation, not the CT calculation.
Let me think about that…..
How would the employer know?
They would find out when HMRC gave them the news at the end of each financial year. Perhaps they could be let of if they could demonstrat that they always paid the Real living Wage?
HMRC could not do that …
Not to be pedantic but Id make it the mean rather than average. Average incomes are deceptive where there are areas with pockets of extreme wealth like London and some other major cities. London combines apparently high ‘average’ incomes with some of the highest poverty rates in the country.
And the minimum wage level is a sick joke when so many end up on in-work benefits.
Writing this on my way home after seeing Nye at the National. A reminder that the Tories now are much as they were in the 30s and 40s, and are doing their best to take the health system back to those times.
NYE is brilliant, imo
But, maybe deliberately written to provide such contrasts.
Some argue that the Minimum Wage has acted like a ceiling, allowing employers to pay as little as they can legally get away with, or others just put 2 fingers up. (https://www.thenational.scot/politics/24268259.new-labour-policy-helps-fuel-low-pay/#comments-anchor)
It’s time we had some kind of maximum wage, salary, or “compensation” to curb excessive income levels, perhaps linked to the MW, or to the lowest pay in a business, or maybe we need the kind of very high levels of taxation we had after the war, which some say curbed high pay, or even the rates in the 70’s which were also high.
I have always favoured a % differential between the lowest and highest paid in any organisation. If you want to pay the CEO £250,000 per month, that is absolutely fine, but you must pay the lowest paid (probably the cleaner) £25,000 per month. There would need to be controls to prevent the use of outsourcing and non-salary benefits to avoid the issue, but it is certainly do-able.
I am not sure how this might be legislated
But it could be done with regard to tax relief