Pay Facts

Even though inflation has fallen in recent months it is going to take years for wages to recover to their pre-recession levels. We can’t rely on low oil prices to deliver higher living standards – sustainable increases in household budgets rely on higher rates of pay growth (which are still well below pre-crisis trends).

While average wages have plummeted since 2010, pay packets for FTSE 100 CEOs have gone up by £700,000 in real-terms since the last election. The average FTSE CEO earns 123 times the average wage.

 

One in five workers earn below the living wage and in some parts of the country this rises to one in two. Poverty pay is becoming more entrenched.

Since 2010, 50 per cent of the net growth in women’s jobs has come from low-paying industries.

Zero-hours workers earn £300 a week less on average than workers on permanent contracts. Two in five zero-hours workers earn less than £111 a week and do not qualify for statutory sick pay.

According to the Office for Budget Responsibility the UK is facing an income tax and national insurance shortfall despite rising employment levels. The OBR say this is due to the numbers of people going into relatively low-paid work and the sharp growth in self-employment, much of which is poorly paid. Analysis by the IPPR for the TUC shows that poor performance on wages will leave the Exchequer over £33bn worse off this financial year than would have been the case under their 2010 plans.

 

Even more strikingly, unsecured household debt is forecast to grow 4.5 times as fast as wages – by 70 per cent between 2015 and 2019. It will reach an average of around £29,000 of unsecured debt per household by 2019.

The OBR says that under the Chancellor’s economic plans household debt will rise by 61 per cent over the next parliament and nearly trillion higher than it was before the last financial crash. The Chancellor is stoking up another debt bubble.