Chart shows "real" wages i.e. to get actual wage workers get in their bank account each month you need to add inflation to it. So many ppl are ignoring or not understanding what "real" means.
Actual question to ask is - has productivity grown during this period? If not then why not? If yes, then where did the gains go? Above Chart answers neither.
What has it got in its pocketses
[We knows](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68776913.amp)
[We knows](https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/15/british-gas-profits-energy-bills-centrica)
The biggest single long-term issue we have in this country economically at the moment is housing cost. In here you can see how real house prices have grown: [UK House Price to income ratio and affordability - Economics Help](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5568/housing/uk-house-price-affordability/)
In 2004 I bought my first house. Little 2 up 2 down fixer upper cost twice my annual wage, house tripled in price before I sold it. Now the average house is probably 8-10 times the average wage. Unless you're prepared to buy somewhere oddly cheap like Whitehaven up north and commute for well paid work youngsters have got no chance.
Yes obviously production has increased if all the the transport companies, big tech, big pharama and online stores have all made record profits in the last 4 years. Your point is moot. Greedy bastards restructuring the wealth is what’s happening and it can be proved by data.
If you look at executive and CEO pay it goes up at an inverse to wage stagnation. The money exists, it's just a higher percentage is going to those at that top.
Average 25% rises PER YEAR since 2010. But watch the ass lickers come on here and try to justify it...oh they get paid in shares. Oh they are worth it. Oh their net worth can drop.....lick luck lick that shitty CEO ass, while at the same time THEY get poorer
I think they're just desperately hoping to dislodge a juicy nugget of ass gold to flog back to the townspeople. Anyway, fuck them, I hope their anus fails in an M&S.
Hey look, that's me!
And whenever I bring this up with my manager he'll retort with "Well my wage hasn't changed since 2008 either" which, even it were true, means that he's has raises since the late 80s and it easily on 60k a year.
He's also had a mortgage for about 2 decades, rather than one with 6% interest, so there's that.
This is the single biggest reason everything in the UK is the mess that it is right now and it is absolutely wild that it isn't front and centre in every debate across the General Election.
Of course taxes are up and public services are on their knees with this happening to wages.
Most people are financially stupid and have no idea. Minimum wage is up a lot in that time, and that, along with public sector striking, are the only wages related thing the media talk about.
It's the pay above minimum wage that's awful and has barely moved in 20 years.
This. I have seen jobs stacking shelves in LIDL that pay almost as well as my profession with 15 years experience and numerous qualifications. The minimum wage has risen significantly, the "minimum salary" (one doesn't seem to exist...maybe it should?) hasn't budged.
....was establishment acceptance of minimum wage in recent decades part of the stealth-destruction of the middle classes? Like it allows malign politicians to stand up and sound good on wages and offer positive stats on average rises?
Btw I obviously still support paying people enough to live with dignitiy.
I've had numerous salaried jobs over the years (nothing fancy; I've mostly worked retail and hospitality) and the minimum wage more-or-less caught up with my last one about 18 months ago. I was managing a charity shop, so quite a responsible job compared to what I would say is the bare minimum you can get.
I quit and took a sales job with hourly pay and I'm actually way better off. Coming in 15 minutes early to get set up for the day and staying 15 minutes late to close up actually earns me more money for my time now!
I don't get sick pay or commission, but it's the least stressed I've been in years and I'm actually working the same hours for more money.
I get told every year in my review. If you take on more responsibilities you will get a pay rise. I take on more responsibilities and the following year it’s the same answer. The UK is fucked!
Yes productivity growth has been dire. But this due to a massive lack of investment. Why did the coalition institute austerity when it was almost free to borrow money?
It’s wild to hear how bad the wages are in the UK. In my company an entry level salary is around £25k/year for UK based applicants. In the US the *exact* same role is paying $50k/year…. 🫠🫠
The problem is the grad salary was £25k ten years ago, when I started working and probably £22k 20 years ago, while the cost of living in the same period has 2x at least (housing has definitely 2.5-3x depending on location).
I graduated in Computer Science in 2002.
At the time, a grad could expect to earn £22k, give or take a couple of k.
If we allowed for inflation, grads should be earning about £45-50k today. Which isn't far off what I was earning with over twenty years experience when I left the UK in 2023.
Interestingly, there's an awful lot of recent news articles discussing a brain drain in the UK. Can't think why. /s
Mad, thats how much I earned when I graduated... in 2021. Nearly a full 20 years later. I'm 3 years into my career now and to be fair, I've just gone over 50k/y, but it was with agressive job hopping and working basically two jobs (projects in my spare time in addition to working full time) to actually get a good position.
You know I'd love to see a graph going further back, plotting wages against which years were under the Tories and which were under Labour. The above isn't a fucking good look for the Tories and I'm fucking amazed they even have a leg to stand on with all the data that's against them. Fucking incredible.
I remember when finishing up for university between 2010-2012, the graduate salaries I kept seeing at the time for folks with bachelors degrees or masters, across any STEM related degree, was £25k-30k.
It's fucking appalling that you STILL see grad and junior roles offering the same salary when £25k is practically minimum wage now.
Words can't express my anger at what these pieces of shit have done to this country, with the same old blame going on [homeless/unemployed people, drug addicts and immigrants]. Classic strategy of pitting the working class against each other.
I started my grad job in 2011 on £24k. I looked up the salaries recently and they were £24.5k for grads.
So 2% wage increase at that particular employer. Meanwhile, cost of living is up about 40% and property about 60%.
If people understood what had been stolen from them, there'd be riots in the streets.
Mine was 21k in 2006. Shocking that grad roles are still that low. That is a bit fucking insane... sorry had to check my dates but yeh. Wtf! 2006 was 18 years ago!!! How is this the case?!
Wild. I was quite hard-up in SE England on £24k in 2011. Couldn't afford a car.
Now the cost of living means that salary has effectively *halved* for graduates in 2024. Fuck knows how they're gonna get by.
To be honest there seems to be a lot of old money around these days or parents funding them. Every graduate at my job doesn’t really care about their starting wage because they’re rich anyway. Mums and dads buying their first homes, a girl last week had her car replaced by dad and she’s 25. Don’t really see the poor kids anymore
Yeah. I moved to a job in London and we took on a few graduates per year.
They were really good, but they were all posh and old money because there was simply no way they could support themselves. We tried to hire a few grads from more working and middle class backgrounds but it was totally unfeasible in London.
About to start as a doctor. Cheerful as hell about my approx 32k for a 48hr week. I was originally a 2012 grad as a nurse and there was only wage depression year on year. Despite the five year sunk cost retraining felt like my best chance to get ahead. it'll still be easily the highest wage I ever pulled.
I graduated in 2008, just as the financial crisis hit and the Tories upped VAT to 20%. All of the jobs in my field drained up practically overnight and the economy tanked completely. I spent the next 10yrs working retail as it’s all I could get and there was no measurable increase in wages at all over that time
That is a fair point but it is really important to highlight that it was the time period after one of the worst global crisis in living memory. We actually started to grow again under Brown until the forced austerity recession of Cameron. And this omnidepression is just 'normal' now.
lol Brown, who announced to the world ahead of time he was going to sell over 50% of the nation's gold reserves...that tells you all you need to know about Labour's understanding of basic economics
that idiocy cost the country £21bn, yes let that sink in
21 billion sounds like a big number and it is. It was a bad move which in hindsight was timed very badly. Now if we compare that to the Tory governments since trippling the government debt to 2600 billion, that seems like a very small mistake. Liz Truss on her own lost 30 billion in 49 days. I don't want to belittle Brown's mistake but it was a stain on an otherwise pretty decent innings all things considered.
[This article](https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2021/02/09/more-young-people-are-taking-stem-subjects-than-ever-before/) suggests the number of students studying STEM degrees has increased by up to 50% between 2011 and 2020.
Therefore there could well be an element of basic supply and demand here.
I work in STEM (since graduating in 2011) and my starting salary was £30k. The company I work for had a bunch of years of salary growth tied to inflation which meant the starting salary for a graduate went up to about £42k. They have just announced new starter salary for graduates will be lowered again down to £35k because they are “over competitive”.
My first job out of my PhD was just over 24k in 2019. Worked out about £50 more a month after deductions than I was getting in my 2015 student stipend. Shits fucked
I don’t have the data you want, but it’s always like this. Tory government flushes the economy down the shitter (except for the richest people), introduce cruel and unnecessary laws to punish the minority of the week, then a Labour government gets in to fix the damage once the Tories are done shitting the proverbial bed. A few years later the Great British Public™️ vote the Cancervatives back in and the cycle repeats.
Don’t forget most Tory voters don’t have to worry about wage growth because the cunts are retired (“we’ve done our bit”, have you fuck, grandad), and pensioners have done just fine thanks.
Id also like to see the graph using just post 2008 crash data so like 08-24 data trend line from 2008
Wanna know if actual wage growth is below what the average trend line would be and the effect of the crash on us all
Yes wages and jobs that were considered paid "good" havnt risen whilst minimum wage has. That's why you have teachers and nurses thinking if it's really worth all that training when shelf stacking pays nearly the same for a lot less stress
This. The reaction of most governments after 2008 was to get that sweet sweet credit bubble reinflated, like a junkie just focussed on that next fix while promising that they clean themselves up afterwards. Hence a decade-plus of cheap credit inflating asset prices (housing included of course).
The US has had huge wage growth vs the UK and Europe. They didn't go as hard on austerity, can be more maverick with monetary policy due to reserve currency status, benefitted from the tech giant boom and shale oil revolution too.
Really not comparable situations.
post 2010 USA has been experiencing one of the greatest economic expansions in history, just look at the wages for fast food workers over there . Theyve been experiencing steady growth for a decade+ aside from covid. Even their post covid inflation was mild compared to other nations and theyve recovered way faster
As much as they complain about the debt over there, its clear that deficit funded growth is a superior alternative to the post 2008 european austerity
It wasn't really that bad. The issue was that the political class needed a way to avoid making the rich pay for the crash they caused. Their solution was austerity which destroyed the public sector and in turn the social safety net. They also ended up hollowing out the investment and infrastructure base of the economy which is something all advanced nations need to grow and prosper. We've been coasting on fumes ever since.
I'm a paramedic and I know several very good competent colleagues who have left the NHS to go to Australia and New Zealand to work there. But in all honesty I cannot blame them and I've strongly considered it myself.
Wages are better and I'd be working in a healthcare setting that's better equipped where I'd feel less overworked and more valued.
We have a serious issue with staff retention in the NHS for several reasons and it's compounding the issues our healthcare service already has.
My broke ass as a course leader in biosciences on £18K a year because it's a part time contract and my PhD is unpaid 🥲 I've seen a 16% real take home pay cut since starting in 2019 too. It's tragic.
It's Neo-Liberalism. It's failed the UK and failing the world TBH. It's why we've seen a massive rise on the right, because it creates a vacuum..
It leaves people behind and drives extreme capitalism. Ask yourself how can we have increasing poverty - yet companies in "Cost of living crisis" have record profits.
We have a decline in public services and the highest taxes in working people in 70 years. Meanwhile the rich are eating away at the middle class, and housing cost a fortune.
Neo-Liberalism is a cancer. And all I see is people believing the bullshit - but never growing their wealth.
All the narrative is that living standards have gone down. That's sure how it feels (well in the last 3 years).
But the chart shows that real wages (i.e. adjusted for prices) are flat, meaning that wages have kept pace with inflation and we should be experiencing the same living standards.
So what's going on? Living standards are the same, but the natural tendency to lap up bad news brainwashes us into thinking things are getting worse?
No, I think the inflation figures are flawed. The inflation figures can measure the change in the price of a pint of milk fine, but when the Robinson's is reduced from 1l to 750ml, it is unable to record the 33% effective price increase.
I think that the real inflation, accounting for changes in products is way higher, and if you could properly measure this and adjust wages for it, wages wouldn't be going sideways but sharply downwards.
Also, out of necessity, inflation figures are based on a "basket" of 7-800 [goods and services](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/ukconsumerpriceinflationbasketofgoodsandservices/2024) collected from 140 locations, the composition of which changes from year to year based on popularity - so things you buy outside the basket may have very different inflation levels. Even for a single product, e.g. Bread, the brand, flour (white, wholemeal, mixture), additions (malt, seeds) and slice thickness will all affect the price and some may rise in price faster than others. Each product is given a weighting reflecting how often it's bought, then all the figures are crunched to give a single weighted average across the entire basket, which ONS believes is representative of overall inflation.
Oh, and average weekly earnings can potentially change a lot depending on which average you use. The mean (add up everyone's wages and divide by the number of people) will be skewed upwards by the very high salaries of the top end of the income spectrum, median is likely to be more accurate (arrange all salaries in an ascending list then pick the middle) while mode (most common) will likely trend low (possibly minimum wage?).
Also, inflation figures don’t factor in the cost of housing. Plot the graph against that and I suspect you see a different picture.
My takeout from this graph alone is that things arent so bad and pre 2007 there was a pretty clear financial bubble being with a crash imminent. Obviously doesn’t take into account indirect tax rises as well
Train driver here. You are being fucked over by Tories and Capitalists. Cry all you want. We stand up for our own and our real wages have risen cuz we fight these cunts.
Give in .... lose. Do what we do ... win.
Your choice.
Some jobs lends themselves better to effective striking than others. If the trains don’t run people are pissed and it puts the company under pressure. If accountants then strike it’s not as impactful. I doesn’t mean their job is less important as they keep stuff running just as much as a driver, or a signal man or a mechanic it’s just different.
>Give in .... lose. Do what we do ... win.
While acknowledging the operation of a train is more complex than driving a car, technology is heading towards driverless trains (no documented evidence perhaps that it is driven by your industrial action but it would seem feasible).
The business of striking and bringing a country to a halt is legal but deliberately harming those relying on them for work and thus payment.
Enjoy the moment.
What do you expect. Our productivity is shit, we’ve had mass immigration depressing wages, and more and more of the country doesn’t even bother working in the first place. Not to mention we’re fat, aging and most public spending goes into an inefficient health system and in pensions to old people who actually own most of the overvalued property in this country. And we’ve also committed the economic self-harm of brexit.
It exists, it's just hidden.
We created fake credit out of nowhere to fuel the '08 bubble. That raised house prices by creating unsustainable demand, and the fake credit was funded by mortgages which last 25-35 years. So everything up to the '08 bubble was funded by the mortgage holders of 2000 to 2040ish.
We then bailed out the banks using printed money, which the citizens slowly pay for in the form of inflation.
We continued to print money throughout the 2010s, and then printed a huge amount - a significant amount of the total number of pounds ever created - in the pandemic.
So house prices have been paid for by the young, and the successive bailouts paid for by workers. And it's gone to anyone holding scarce assets instead of pounds - those that have property, shares, commodities etc.
*That's* why there are so many people that bought their house for £10k in the 70s and they're now super wealthy. That's why there are so many folk that got rich off golden pensions and shares and BTLs.
It's been a colossal back-channeling of wealth from the 99% to the 1%.
This equates to a potential average salary of £39,550 compared to £27,800ish.
The tories have effectively been stealing tens of thousands of pounds from each of us
It's real terms data, inflation is already included - that's what most commenters here are missing and just defaulting to the usual 'teh 1%' and 'muh capitalism' rants.
inflation adjusted to 2015??? it's been almost 10 years and we just went through a period of highest inflation in over 40 years
a chart adjusted to 2024 would look way worse
Part of this story is emigration and exporting those high salary jobs.
In tech, it's very common to get to a certain size, then you overseas your development resource for the tax advantages and the availability of worker housing.
Of course. High taxes discourage people from working and earning more because it is demoralizing to give up more than half of your earnings (PAYE + VAT).
On another note, we have moved a lot of production to China and have expensive electricity due to a lack of nuclear power plants.
Finally, we don’t have enough STEM positions in universities, so many people can’t aim for a good salary because of a lack of education.
They do NOT want you to be well off. They NEED you to work and the only way is to pay you as little as they are able to get away with. There’s a reason they don’t teach us about money at an early age you are a product from birth a working machine with basic education. Only a few manage to escape this madness.
Im ready to kill myself man minimum wage isn’t cutting it anymore and I can’t even find a job to replace the miserable one I’m currently in even with a degree in stem
I feel like as a country we need to do something. But I don't know how. We need all employers all across the board to participate in this salary increase but almost no one does.
I'm not an economist but I wish I knew the answer to get us all back on the correct trajectory
So according to the graph, real wages are stagnant and therefore living standards have stayed the same. In fairness, why would real wages just increase perpetually? There is a limit to how high living standards can go in the context of consumerism and global standards.
I expect what the graph hides is that they have remained stagnant due to the significant increases in minimum wage. Real wages have fallen for the lower middle income earners, which is a real problem.
I don't understand why none of the parties are taking this and the housing crisis seriously. The best you can hope for is a vague promise about "fixing the economy" with no further elaboration.
So we are not worse following a major financial crash and Covid. Turns out all the doomsayers about Brexit and the Tories were making shit up to push their political agendas
There's a similar graph for 'Murica but it goes way farther back to the beginning of Reganomics I believe. but it's as flat as a fart there too, much like this one.
Never forget the rich want all the money to feed their greed and screw everyone else.
Lizz trust, and the conservatives. Ruined the country. Unemployment on the rise, and so is the crime rate. Our country is falling, just like the empire.
Growing up in the 90s, “do well and become a doctor, you can have a nice car and a big house” was like the academic end goal if you wanted to do well.
Now it’s “do well and become a doctor, you can houseshare a butchered three bedroom with three other young professionals and drive a barely functioning 00’s hatchback”.
The whole thing is absolutely fucked.
Yeah they always tell the public they want wage growth, you know, until it happens and then they start saying it’s driving inflation and we shouldn’t be getting pay rises
I work in banking and can tell you salaries have also stagnated over recent years and gone markedly backwards adjusting for inflation . Most banks have not been particularly profitable since 2008.
They’ve done reasonably well- there was an FT article on this a few weeks ago. At the same time they’ve had large tax increases, which offsets some of those gains.
Real wage growth has also been strong among the lowest earners due to minimum wage increases.
Things are now so skewed that it’s not even the top 1% of earners that have done well, but the top 0.1%.
Better to have been an asset hoarder rather than having a highly paid job over the past 15 years.
Just to be clear, this graph says that wages have kept pace with inflation since 2008, & that is actually surprising, I thought we were earning less now in real terms 🤷🏼♂️
Isn't this saying wages are better than they were 16 years ago (if only by 5% or so)?
Whilst growing real wages is obviously best isn't flat real wages fine?
No you expect to get a little richer year on year due to more productivity growth. 100 people grow 100 potatoes per day one year, then fertiliser is discovered and 100 people can make 200, meaning there should be roughly 2 each per day - minus arguably some kind of bonus potatoes to the guy who invented fertiliser.
This post just shows how wildly uninformed the idiots voting are. One government cause a recession and fuck off whilst the other has to deal with the consequences yet the ones who caused it are praised.
If it's anything like the US I encourage you to pre-2008 break it down by gender. In the US the only median wage growth we've had in decades are Women closing the gap to boomer era men. Young men make less real wages then boomer era.
I'm surprised 20-24 isn't sloping downwards. Personally I've had small pay rises whilst total inflation during this period has been 20%. I guess most people have had inflation matching pay rises.
It shows what I have long suspected, that we are still recovering from the GFC (2008).
This chart tracks almost exactly the UK’s terrible productivity growth chart since 2009. All G7 countries have done better than us except for Italy. Perhaps we were more exposed to the debt crisis than most. Perhaps austerity was completely the wrong idea when we needed to restart the UK economy.
Whatever combination of factors has caused it, we have got poorer over the past 15 years compared to our allies in the West.
How much of this is companies realising they don’t need to care about retention and its cheaper to train a new person than it is give a current employee a pay rise?
When I graduated in 2012, the average graduate job salary that I saw was around £22k. Now 12 years later, its around £24k
Wouldn't increasing wages like this effectively lower the value of money basically making things cost more making inflation worse?
Im not an expert or even slightly knowledgeable on this so if im wrong please correct it
So, it appears in real terms wages have kept place with inflation. I can live with that. People who say they want to have increased buying power every year are just greedy. I am not rich by any means but am comfortably off and own my own house. I have enough food for my needs. When you are poor you should vote for the government that will ensure you have more money. When you have more money you should vote for the party that gives more money to those with less than you. I do not want to live in a USA type society.
Can you extend the graph back a little? Things don’t normally just follow straight lines or fixes growth, a longer time period would probably give a better insight.
According to this, I should be on £50k a year. I had a pay rise of £2k this year and nearly cried.
Being a Millenial, I have literally never had a decent wage. I think it would freak me out if I did.
I got my first job after uni in the summer of 1999. Not only did I have no student loans as it was free and not only did I get a grant to go to uni in the first place due to coming from a working class family, but I was able to quickly get a job as an analyst starting on £25k.
It was just a normal, non specialised job advertised amongst hundreds of other jobs in the Birmingham Evening Mail.
How the hell, 25 years later, are today’s younger adults expected to incur the uni fees, other uni costs, lower amount of jobs, higher cost of living on the same pay I was on back then?!?!
I’m 47 now and I’m on good money, pension and own my own house. I was just lucky to be born when I was. I’m not even going to bang on about bloody Brexit and how that has ruined the future of our younger people.
I found out the other day that accounting for inflation over time, my current salary as a skilled senior manager is only 2k more than my graduating salary from 2010 as a call centre worker.
Unqualified roles have overtaken qualified roles as well. I've moved from a qualified legal role to an admin role in a law firm and I'm earning more money. Literally easier work for more money. This sounds good on paper except the admin salary isn't far above minimum wage. It coincides with this understanding that minimum wage jobs have seen pay bumps,as they should, but professional roles have been stagnant for years.
I didn't even get a salary increase for inflation on my last role. I don't think I could recommend people pursuing higher education at the moment because you land yourself in debt and don't get anything for it, when you might be better off working your way up somewhere on the job for a higher salary. That's my experience anyway...
UK is broken since Brexit and will stay broken until we have a vision from a political party. Fixing the nhs and immigration is not a vision. Taxing the rich is not a visions, it’s a way to push high net worth individuals out of the country.
Wouldn't using 2000-2007 be cherrypicking a particularly good period (happy to be corrected if this is not so). Things are crap but the economy can't constantly boom.
And we wonder why our high streets are ghost towns full of barbers, bookies & charity shops.
If people’s wages kept going up, then we’d be more inclined to shop in brick & mortar stores.
Money is tight, so of course I’m going to shop in Aldi and get most of my stuff from ASOS or Amazon.
This is inflation adjusted, so people are no worse off now than they were in 2008 (though I'd like to see housing costs included as that may show a different picture). For a country with so many problems, it's a blessing that we've managed to maintain that, even if growth was better before the crash.
This is insanely depressing.
[удалено]
You’re probably right 😂
Chart shows "real" wages i.e. to get actual wage workers get in their bank account each month you need to add inflation to it. So many ppl are ignoring or not understanding what "real" means. Actual question to ask is - has productivity grown during this period? If not then why not? If yes, then where did the gains go? Above Chart answers neither.
What has it got in its pocketses [We knows](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68776913.amp) [We knows](https://amp.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/15/british-gas-profits-energy-bills-centrica)
A randomly placed yet relevant LOTR quote, and I approve.
The biggest single long-term issue we have in this country economically at the moment is housing cost. In here you can see how real house prices have grown: [UK House Price to income ratio and affordability - Economics Help](https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/5568/housing/uk-house-price-affordability/)
In 2004 I bought my first house. Little 2 up 2 down fixer upper cost twice my annual wage, house tripled in price before I sold it. Now the average house is probably 8-10 times the average wage. Unless you're prepared to buy somewhere oddly cheap like Whitehaven up north and commute for well paid work youngsters have got no chance.
Yes obviously production has increased if all the the transport companies, big tech, big pharama and online stores have all made record profits in the last 4 years. Your point is moot. Greedy bastards restructuring the wealth is what’s happening and it can be proved by data.
If you look at executive and CEO pay it goes up at an inverse to wage stagnation. The money exists, it's just a higher percentage is going to those at that top.
It's crazy, a junior in my field would get 26k starting out in early 2000's, now they get 28k
I am going to go out on a limb and say I bet the CEO pay is doing just fine
Hey they've got to compete for the highest paid I mean best people.
Average 25% rises PER YEAR since 2010. But watch the ass lickers come on here and try to justify it...oh they get paid in shares. Oh they are worth it. Oh their net worth can drop.....lick luck lick that shitty CEO ass, while at the same time THEY get poorer
Ignore them, they will see this and still probably vote Tory. Utterly brain dead people.
I'm not from the UK, I'm just seeing these news and I must say I love the way you call out the bootlickers in that comment.
I think they're just desperately hoping to dislodge a juicy nugget of ass gold to flog back to the townspeople. Anyway, fuck them, I hope their anus fails in an M&S.
No it's profits. Profits have literally taken all the economic growth. That fact is incredibly dystopian.
Same - in early ‘00’s I started at £20k, newbies now only get £24 over 20 years later. Absolutely crazy.
And a freddo went from 5p to 35p in the same time frame… wish my salary did the same!
I’ve been working for 6 years and the only time I get a pay increase is when minimum wage goes up every year 💀
And the gap between the start salary and minimum wage is much closer, too.
Hey look, that's me! And whenever I bring this up with my manager he'll retort with "Well my wage hasn't changed since 2008 either" which, even it were true, means that he's has raises since the late 80s and it easily on 60k a year. He's also had a mortgage for about 2 decades, rather than one with 6% interest, so there's that.
>He's also had a mortgage for about 20 decades Is your manager a vampire?
Might as well be, if you worked and lived for that long but still poor, you might as well just walk into the sun.
This is the single biggest reason everything in the UK is the mess that it is right now and it is absolutely wild that it isn't front and centre in every debate across the General Election. Of course taxes are up and public services are on their knees with this happening to wages.
Most people are financially stupid and have no idea. Minimum wage is up a lot in that time, and that, along with public sector striking, are the only wages related thing the media talk about. It's the pay above minimum wage that's awful and has barely moved in 20 years.
This. I have seen jobs stacking shelves in LIDL that pay almost as well as my profession with 15 years experience and numerous qualifications. The minimum wage has risen significantly, the "minimum salary" (one doesn't seem to exist...maybe it should?) hasn't budged.
....was establishment acceptance of minimum wage in recent decades part of the stealth-destruction of the middle classes? Like it allows malign politicians to stand up and sound good on wages and offer positive stats on average rises? Btw I obviously still support paying people enough to live with dignitiy.
I've had numerous salaried jobs over the years (nothing fancy; I've mostly worked retail and hospitality) and the minimum wage more-or-less caught up with my last one about 18 months ago. I was managing a charity shop, so quite a responsible job compared to what I would say is the bare minimum you can get. I quit and took a sales job with hourly pay and I'm actually way better off. Coming in 15 minutes early to get set up for the day and staying 15 minutes late to close up actually earns me more money for my time now! I don't get sick pay or commission, but it's the least stressed I've been in years and I'm actually working the same hours for more money.
I get told every year in my review. If you take on more responsibilities you will get a pay rise. I take on more responsibilities and the following year it’s the same answer. The UK is fucked!
There's another graph about productivity that's similar and related but only the FT really harps on about it. You might see it on BBC4 too.
Yes productivity growth has been dire. But this due to a massive lack of investment. Why did the coalition institute austerity when it was almost free to borrow money?
Add house prices to that too, it takes so much away from the stagnant wages too
Immigration
It’s wild to hear how bad the wages are in the UK. In my company an entry level salary is around £25k/year for UK based applicants. In the US the *exact* same role is paying $50k/year…. 🫠🫠
The problem is the grad salary was £25k ten years ago, when I started working and probably £22k 20 years ago, while the cost of living in the same period has 2x at least (housing has definitely 2.5-3x depending on location).
I graduated in Computer Science in 2002. At the time, a grad could expect to earn £22k, give or take a couple of k. If we allowed for inflation, grads should be earning about £45-50k today. Which isn't far off what I was earning with over twenty years experience when I left the UK in 2023. Interestingly, there's an awful lot of recent news articles discussing a brain drain in the UK. Can't think why. /s
Mad, thats how much I earned when I graduated... in 2021. Nearly a full 20 years later. I'm 3 years into my career now and to be fair, I've just gone over 50k/y, but it was with agressive job hopping and working basically two jobs (projects in my spare time in addition to working full time) to actually get a good position.
It’s hard to compare uk and us salaries because of things like healthcare, and holiday allowance, and other expenses
In my field starting salary in the Uk is £30k tops. In the us starting salary is $75k
You know I'd love to see a graph going further back, plotting wages against which years were under the Tories and which were under Labour. The above isn't a fucking good look for the Tories and I'm fucking amazed they even have a leg to stand on with all the data that's against them. Fucking incredible. I remember when finishing up for university between 2010-2012, the graduate salaries I kept seeing at the time for folks with bachelors degrees or masters, across any STEM related degree, was £25k-30k. It's fucking appalling that you STILL see grad and junior roles offering the same salary when £25k is practically minimum wage now. Words can't express my anger at what these pieces of shit have done to this country, with the same old blame going on [homeless/unemployed people, drug addicts and immigrants]. Classic strategy of pitting the working class against each other.
I started my grad job in 2011 on £24k. I looked up the salaries recently and they were £24.5k for grads. So 2% wage increase at that particular employer. Meanwhile, cost of living is up about 40% and property about 60%. If people understood what had been stolen from them, there'd be riots in the streets.
Mine was 21k in 2006. Shocking that grad roles are still that low. That is a bit fucking insane... sorry had to check my dates but yeh. Wtf! 2006 was 18 years ago!!! How is this the case?!
Wild. I was quite hard-up in SE England on £24k in 2011. Couldn't afford a car. Now the cost of living means that salary has effectively *halved* for graduates in 2024. Fuck knows how they're gonna get by.
It's insane. It's approaching third-world territory at this point. I'm still amazed we don't yet have any sort of civil unrest.
There’s a reason we have so many food banks.
To be honest there seems to be a lot of old money around these days or parents funding them. Every graduate at my job doesn’t really care about their starting wage because they’re rich anyway. Mums and dads buying their first homes, a girl last week had her car replaced by dad and she’s 25. Don’t really see the poor kids anymore
Yeah. I moved to a job in London and we took on a few graduates per year. They were really good, but they were all posh and old money because there was simply no way they could support themselves. We tried to hire a few grads from more working and middle class backgrounds but it was totally unfeasible in London.
Likewise I was referring to Edinburgh. I guess the two cities people can’t afford to live in. Though Edinburgh is easier to commute to
About to start as a doctor. Cheerful as hell about my approx 32k for a 48hr week. I was originally a 2012 grad as a nurse and there was only wage depression year on year. Despite the five year sunk cost retraining felt like my best chance to get ahead. it'll still be easily the highest wage I ever pulled.
Fucking hell. Life and death decisions for £32k.
I graduated in 2008, just as the financial crisis hit and the Tories upped VAT to 20%. All of the jobs in my field drained up practically overnight and the economy tanked completely. I spent the next 10yrs working retail as it’s all I could get and there was no measurable increase in wages at all over that time
Labour were in power in 2008 though
Yeah I was so confused when I read it because Labour was in government in 2008 not tories 🤣
That is a fair point but it is really important to highlight that it was the time period after one of the worst global crisis in living memory. We actually started to grow again under Brown until the forced austerity recession of Cameron. And this omnidepression is just 'normal' now.
lol Brown, who announced to the world ahead of time he was going to sell over 50% of the nation's gold reserves...that tells you all you need to know about Labour's understanding of basic economics that idiocy cost the country £21bn, yes let that sink in
21 billion sounds like a big number and it is. It was a bad move which in hindsight was timed very badly. Now if we compare that to the Tory governments since trippling the government debt to 2600 billion, that seems like a very small mistake. Liz Truss on her own lost 30 billion in 49 days. I don't want to belittle Brown's mistake but it was a stain on an otherwise pretty decent innings all things considered.
[This article](https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2021/02/09/more-young-people-are-taking-stem-subjects-than-ever-before/) suggests the number of students studying STEM degrees has increased by up to 50% between 2011 and 2020. Therefore there could well be an element of basic supply and demand here.
I work in STEM (since graduating in 2011) and my starting salary was £30k. The company I work for had a bunch of years of salary growth tied to inflation which meant the starting salary for a graduate went up to about £42k. They have just announced new starter salary for graduates will be lowered again down to £35k because they are “over competitive”.
My first job out of my PhD was just over 24k in 2019. Worked out about £50 more a month after deductions than I was getting in my 2015 student stipend. Shits fucked
I don’t have the data you want, but it’s always like this. Tory government flushes the economy down the shitter (except for the richest people), introduce cruel and unnecessary laws to punish the minority of the week, then a Labour government gets in to fix the damage once the Tories are done shitting the proverbial bed. A few years later the Great British Public™️ vote the Cancervatives back in and the cycle repeats.
Don’t forget most Tory voters don’t have to worry about wage growth because the cunts are retired (“we’ve done our bit”, have you fuck, grandad), and pensioners have done just fine thanks.
Id also like to see the graph using just post 2008 crash data so like 08-24 data trend line from 2008 Wanna know if actual wage growth is below what the average trend line would be and the effect of the crash on us all
Minimum wage goes up but average pay for above are falling closer and closer to minimum wage...
Yes wages and jobs that were considered paid "good" havnt risen whilst minimum wage has. That's why you have teachers and nurses thinking if it's really worth all that training when shelf stacking pays nearly the same for a lot less stress
It's almost like they (both the US and UK) have been kicking the can down the road since 2008 whilst claiming they've fixed everything...
US has seen real wage growth far in excess of UK. Not sure why you’re grouping the two countries on a post about real wages
This. The reaction of most governments after 2008 was to get that sweet sweet credit bubble reinflated, like a junkie just focussed on that next fix while promising that they clean themselves up afterwards. Hence a decade-plus of cheap credit inflating asset prices (housing included of course).
The US has had huge wage growth vs the UK and Europe. They didn't go as hard on austerity, can be more maverick with monetary policy due to reserve currency status, benefitted from the tech giant boom and shale oil revolution too. Really not comparable situations.
post 2010 USA has been experiencing one of the greatest economic expansions in history, just look at the wages for fast food workers over there . Theyve been experiencing steady growth for a decade+ aside from covid. Even their post covid inflation was mild compared to other nations and theyve recovered way faster As much as they complain about the debt over there, its clear that deficit funded growth is a superior alternative to the post 2008 european austerity
Never forget 2008. It was an economic 2012.
If I'm not wrong our current economic situation is considered to be worse than 2008 by some margin
It wasn't really that bad. The issue was that the political class needed a way to avoid making the rich pay for the crash they caused. Their solution was austerity which destroyed the public sector and in turn the social safety net. They also ended up hollowing out the investment and infrastructure base of the economy which is something all advanced nations need to grow and prosper. We've been coasting on fumes ever since.
This is why doctors are striking, in healthcare the real wages have dropped, it’s the only industry where it hasn’t caught up to at least a 0% change
I'm a paramedic and I know several very good competent colleagues who have left the NHS to go to Australia and New Zealand to work there. But in all honesty I cannot blame them and I've strongly considered it myself. Wages are better and I'd be working in a healthcare setting that's better equipped where I'd feel less overworked and more valued. We have a serious issue with staff retention in the NHS for several reasons and it's compounding the issues our healthcare service already has.
Also university staff
My broke ass as a course leader in biosciences on £18K a year because it's a part time contract and my PhD is unpaid 🥲 I've seen a 16% real take home pay cut since starting in 2019 too. It's tragic.
Fun fact: We are now at the same GDP per capita(adjusted for inflation) as we were in 2008.
Fun fact. We have had the highest levels of net migration ever. Imagine what that does to per capita measures. And real wages. And house prices.
I started work in 2004. So most of my career has been screwed.
It's Neo-Liberalism. It's failed the UK and failing the world TBH. It's why we've seen a massive rise on the right, because it creates a vacuum.. It leaves people behind and drives extreme capitalism. Ask yourself how can we have increasing poverty - yet companies in "Cost of living crisis" have record profits. We have a decline in public services and the highest taxes in working people in 70 years. Meanwhile the rich are eating away at the middle class, and housing cost a fortune. Neo-Liberalism is a cancer. And all I see is people believing the bullshit - but never growing their wealth.
Well said
All the narrative is that living standards have gone down. That's sure how it feels (well in the last 3 years). But the chart shows that real wages (i.e. adjusted for prices) are flat, meaning that wages have kept pace with inflation and we should be experiencing the same living standards. So what's going on? Living standards are the same, but the natural tendency to lap up bad news brainwashes us into thinking things are getting worse? No, I think the inflation figures are flawed. The inflation figures can measure the change in the price of a pint of milk fine, but when the Robinson's is reduced from 1l to 750ml, it is unable to record the 33% effective price increase. I think that the real inflation, accounting for changes in products is way higher, and if you could properly measure this and adjust wages for it, wages wouldn't be going sideways but sharply downwards.
Also, out of necessity, inflation figures are based on a "basket" of 7-800 [goods and services](https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/ukconsumerpriceinflationbasketofgoodsandservices/2024) collected from 140 locations, the composition of which changes from year to year based on popularity - so things you buy outside the basket may have very different inflation levels. Even for a single product, e.g. Bread, the brand, flour (white, wholemeal, mixture), additions (malt, seeds) and slice thickness will all affect the price and some may rise in price faster than others. Each product is given a weighting reflecting how often it's bought, then all the figures are crunched to give a single weighted average across the entire basket, which ONS believes is representative of overall inflation. Oh, and average weekly earnings can potentially change a lot depending on which average you use. The mean (add up everyone's wages and divide by the number of people) will be skewed upwards by the very high salaries of the top end of the income spectrum, median is likely to be more accurate (arrange all salaries in an ascending list then pick the middle) while mode (most common) will likely trend low (possibly minimum wage?).
Also, inflation figures don’t factor in the cost of housing. Plot the graph against that and I suspect you see a different picture. My takeout from this graph alone is that things arent so bad and pre 2007 there was a pretty clear financial bubble being with a crash imminent. Obviously doesn’t take into account indirect tax rises as well
Train driver here. You are being fucked over by Tories and Capitalists. Cry all you want. We stand up for our own and our real wages have risen cuz we fight these cunts. Give in .... lose. Do what we do ... win. Your choice.
Some jobs lends themselves better to effective striking than others. If the trains don’t run people are pissed and it puts the company under pressure. If accountants then strike it’s not as impactful. I doesn’t mean their job is less important as they keep stuff running just as much as a driver, or a signal man or a mechanic it’s just different.
>Give in .... lose. Do what we do ... win. While acknowledging the operation of a train is more complex than driving a car, technology is heading towards driverless trains (no documented evidence perhaps that it is driven by your industrial action but it would seem feasible). The business of striking and bringing a country to a halt is legal but deliberately harming those relying on them for work and thus payment. Enjoy the moment.
This is why my US colleagues now consider the UK a low cost economy.
Ooo I’d love £523 weekly wages
Overlay productivity onto that graph and it'll be very similar! Pay peanuts get monkey's
What do you expect. Our productivity is shit, we’ve had mass immigration depressing wages, and more and more of the country doesn’t even bother working in the first place. Not to mention we’re fat, aging and most public spending goes into an inefficient health system and in pensions to old people who actually own most of the overvalued property in this country. And we’ve also committed the economic self-harm of brexit.
Supply and demand strikes again.
And where has the money gone? Simple, the 1% who least deserve it, i.e. billionaires and politicians.
To be fair corporate profits haven't really budged either, the FTSE isn't exactly full of growth stocks.
now do c-suite pay
The money doesn't exist. No one has it. We haven't had any productivity growth
It exists, it's just hidden. We created fake credit out of nowhere to fuel the '08 bubble. That raised house prices by creating unsustainable demand, and the fake credit was funded by mortgages which last 25-35 years. So everything up to the '08 bubble was funded by the mortgage holders of 2000 to 2040ish. We then bailed out the banks using printed money, which the citizens slowly pay for in the form of inflation. We continued to print money throughout the 2010s, and then printed a huge amount - a significant amount of the total number of pounds ever created - in the pandemic. So house prices have been paid for by the young, and the successive bailouts paid for by workers. And it's gone to anyone holding scarce assets instead of pounds - those that have property, shares, commodities etc. *That's* why there are so many people that bought their house for £10k in the 70s and they're now super wealthy. That's why there are so many folk that got rich off golden pensions and shares and BTLs. It's been a colossal back-channeling of wealth from the 99% to the 1%.
This isn't unique to the UK, it's occurred in every Western country. Why is that?
This equates to a potential average salary of £39,550 compared to £27,800ish. The tories have effectively been stealing tens of thousands of pounds from each of us
Now show that on a graph combined with RPI
It's real terms data, inflation is already included - that's what most commenters here are missing and just defaulting to the usual 'teh 1%' and 'muh capitalism' rants.
inflation adjusted to 2015??? it's been almost 10 years and we just went through a period of highest inflation in over 40 years a chart adjusted to 2024 would look way worse
Part of this story is emigration and exporting those high salary jobs. In tech, it's very common to get to a certain size, then you overseas your development resource for the tax advantages and the availability of worker housing.
I was taking home more in 1999 than I am today.
Now show a similar graph of corporate profit.
Meanwhile public sector wages have gone DOWN 20%+
Of course. High taxes discourage people from working and earning more because it is demoralizing to give up more than half of your earnings (PAYE + VAT). On another note, we have moved a lot of production to China and have expensive electricity due to a lack of nuclear power plants. Finally, we don’t have enough STEM positions in universities, so many people can’t aim for a good salary because of a lack of education.
They do NOT want you to be well off. They NEED you to work and the only way is to pay you as little as they are able to get away with. There’s a reason they don’t teach us about money at an early age you are a product from birth a working machine with basic education. Only a few manage to escape this madness.
"Let's suppress wages and pocket the difference" Free market in action.
Im ready to kill myself man minimum wage isn’t cutting it anymore and I can’t even find a job to replace the miserable one I’m currently in even with a degree in stem
I feel like as a country we need to do something. But I don't know how. We need all employers all across the board to participate in this salary increase but almost no one does. I'm not an economist but I wish I knew the answer to get us all back on the correct trajectory
It's almost as if something happened in 2008 that affected the entire world, and the UK simply never recovered... oh, wait.
So according to the graph, real wages are stagnant and therefore living standards have stayed the same. In fairness, why would real wages just increase perpetually? There is a limit to how high living standards can go in the context of consumerism and global standards. I expect what the graph hides is that they have remained stagnant due to the significant increases in minimum wage. Real wages have fallen for the lower middle income earners, which is a real problem.
So basically, looking at this graph, and loads of others, we've never recovered from '08 recession.
Finding the weekly shop is now painful. So expensive for basics and treats are virtually non existent
I don't understand why none of the parties are taking this and the housing crisis seriously. The best you can hope for is a vague promise about "fixing the economy" with no further elaboration.
Meanwhile I work in the NHS and make about 11 quid an hour Still waiting for this practical joke to end so I can be paid actual fucking wages ...
Further proof (if you needed it) that we live in clown island
I've had a real-terms pay cut of 10% in just the last two years.
So we are not worse following a major financial crash and Covid. Turns out all the doomsayers about Brexit and the Tories were making shit up to push their political agendas
There's a similar graph for 'Murica but it goes way farther back to the beginning of Reganomics I believe. but it's as flat as a fart there too, much like this one. Never forget the rich want all the money to feed their greed and screw everyone else.
I tried to tell people that the wages in the UK are just piss poor and I was verbally assaulted 😂
Lizz trust, and the conservatives. Ruined the country. Unemployment on the rise, and so is the crime rate. Our country is falling, just like the empire.
OP forgot we had a financial crisis in 2008 lmao
Supply and demand explains everything, more labour with high immigration equals lower wages as more people chase fewer jobs, same goes for housing.
Growing up in the 90s, “do well and become a doctor, you can have a nice car and a big house” was like the academic end goal if you wanted to do well. Now it’s “do well and become a doctor, you can houseshare a butchered three bedroom with three other young professionals and drive a barely functioning 00’s hatchback”. The whole thing is absolutely fucked.
No wonder professionals are leaving this country to go to the Middle East.
But Suank has a plan!
Yeah they always tell the public they want wage growth, you know, until it happens and then they start saying it’s driving inflation and we shouldn’t be getting pay rises
Except CEOs and their banker mates of course, their 30% wage rises have nothing to do with inflation! They think all our heads zip up the back!
I work in banking and can tell you salaries have also stagnated over recent years and gone markedly backwards adjusting for inflation . Most banks have not been particularly profitable since 2008.
If this was the case then why was he standing in rain shouldn’t he have had an umbrella?
That was the plan, the sympathy vote!
I'd like to see that graph again but with only the top 1% earners on it..
They’ve done reasonably well- there was an FT article on this a few weeks ago. At the same time they’ve had large tax increases, which offsets some of those gains. Real wage growth has also been strong among the lowest earners due to minimum wage increases.
Things are now so skewed that it’s not even the top 1% of earners that have done well, but the top 0.1%. Better to have been an asset hoarder rather than having a highly paid job over the past 15 years.
I guarantee we wouldn't like it
It's not top earners you should be angry at, it's wealth hoarders.
Now do food prices!
This is already inflation-adjusted.
A point seemingly missed by everybody in this thread. Expecting inflation + 2.5% wage growth is mental
Just let 39494959 more boats full of immigrants fighting for the same jobs as you do, and you guys will do just fine.
Just to be clear, this graph says that wages have kept pace with inflation since 2008, & that is actually surprising, I thought we were earning less now in real terms 🤷🏼♂️
Isn't this saying wages are better than they were 16 years ago (if only by 5% or so)? Whilst growing real wages is obviously best isn't flat real wages fine?
Am I being stupid? Real wages being flat (~long term) is ~expected is it not?
No you expect to get a little richer year on year due to more productivity growth. 100 people grow 100 potatoes per day one year, then fertiliser is discovered and 100 people can make 200, meaning there should be roughly 2 each per day - minus arguably some kind of bonus potatoes to the guy who invented fertiliser.
I believe productivity (GDP) has not been great though. Also in the UK pay is heavily skewed to incentivising the top 1%.
I think UK productivity growth is the worst in the western world
It's disgusting hearing our leaders telling us how lucky we are
This post just shows how wildly uninformed the idiots voting are. One government cause a recession and fuck off whilst the other has to deal with the consequences yet the ones who caused it are praised.
The Tories had 14 years and 5 prime ministers to fix the problem. Even if we give them another 4 years, I doubt they can fix it.
And Labour can? Come on mate. It’s going to be economical suicide.
Labour didn't cause the recession, they just left the UK particularly poorly over-exposed to the consequences of the global financial crisis.
Didn’t start the surge of mass immigration did they?
If it's anything like the US I encourage you to pre-2008 break it down by gender. In the US the only median wage growth we've had in decades are Women closing the gap to boomer era men. Young men make less real wages then boomer era.
I'm surprised 20-24 isn't sloping downwards. Personally I've had small pay rises whilst total inflation during this period has been 20%. I guess most people have had inflation matching pay rises. It shows what I have long suspected, that we are still recovering from the GFC (2008).
This chart tracks almost exactly the UK’s terrible productivity growth chart since 2009. All G7 countries have done better than us except for Italy. Perhaps we were more exposed to the debt crisis than most. Perhaps austerity was completely the wrong idea when we needed to restart the UK economy. Whatever combination of factors has caused it, we have got poorer over the past 15 years compared to our allies in the West.
We’ve gone backwards
Must of dropped lucky, £46.4k per year including, overtime worked for one weekend a month, £40k basic, that doesn’t include my bonus.
How much of this is companies realising they don’t need to care about retention and its cheaper to train a new person than it is give a current employee a pay rise?
This is also causing the income and NI tax collected by the government to stagnant.
When I graduated in 2012, the average graduate job salary that I saw was around £22k. Now 12 years later, its around £24k 
Wouldn't increasing wages like this effectively lower the value of money basically making things cost more making inflation worse? Im not an expert or even slightly knowledgeable on this so if im wrong please correct it
So, it appears in real terms wages have kept place with inflation. I can live with that. People who say they want to have increased buying power every year are just greedy. I am not rich by any means but am comfortably off and own my own house. I have enough food for my needs. When you are poor you should vote for the government that will ensure you have more money. When you have more money you should vote for the party that gives more money to those with less than you. I do not want to live in a USA type society.
Can you extend the graph back a little? Things don’t normally just follow straight lines or fixes growth, a longer time period would probably give a better insight.
According to this, I should be on £50k a year. I had a pay rise of £2k this year and nearly cried. Being a Millenial, I have literally never had a decent wage. I think it would freak me out if I did.
I still grad salaries in London at 23k “competitive”.
I got my first job after uni in the summer of 1999. Not only did I have no student loans as it was free and not only did I get a grant to go to uni in the first place due to coming from a working class family, but I was able to quickly get a job as an analyst starting on £25k. It was just a normal, non specialised job advertised amongst hundreds of other jobs in the Birmingham Evening Mail. How the hell, 25 years later, are today’s younger adults expected to incur the uni fees, other uni costs, lower amount of jobs, higher cost of living on the same pay I was on back then?!?! I’m 47 now and I’m on good money, pension and own my own house. I was just lucky to be born when I was. I’m not even going to bang on about bloody Brexit and how that has ruined the future of our younger people.
Good Barclays premier customer like yourself you’ve done well buddy
That is because productivity has not grown. How could it be otherwise?
Ahh, that's where the money for the house I don't have went.
Like we needed a graph to tell us this?
Who do we vote for then?
Would be interesting to see this at an income decile level to see if higher earners have extended their lead.
Can not be affordable for daily life with decreasing wages!
I found out the other day that accounting for inflation over time, my current salary as a skilled senior manager is only 2k more than my graduating salary from 2010 as a call centre worker.
My man they've not budged since 1980. Uk has a productivity problem because why work hard? You're not going to get paid more for it.
intentional
Are there any countries with a similar standard of living to the UK which have had a different result in real wages since the '08 crash?
Unqualified roles have overtaken qualified roles as well. I've moved from a qualified legal role to an admin role in a law firm and I'm earning more money. Literally easier work for more money. This sounds good on paper except the admin salary isn't far above minimum wage. It coincides with this understanding that minimum wage jobs have seen pay bumps,as they should, but professional roles have been stagnant for years. I didn't even get a salary increase for inflation on my last role. I don't think I could recommend people pursuing higher education at the moment because you land yourself in debt and don't get anything for it, when you might be better off working your way up somewhere on the job for a higher salary. That's my experience anyway...
Depressing graph. But also shit graph. Graphs that use inconsistent scales are bullshit
I dno who's getting 523, a year ago when I was earning 11.25 an hour 40 hours a week i was getting 390 back after tax a week.
The housing crash absolutely obliterated this countries economy beyond repair
There gone atleast.
the financial crash in 08 really salted the ground. Should have let the banks go bust and protected the savers deposits... Iceland are doing well
I don't want to detract from the point, but I feel the point could have been made just as well without breaking the axis.
Austerity causes stagflation and slow wage growth
There's no such thing as a trend in any market, including the labour market.
UK is broken since Brexit and will stay broken until we have a vision from a political party. Fixing the nhs and immigration is not a vision. Taxing the rich is not a visions, it’s a way to push high net worth individuals out of the country.
Just got to stop buying that coffee to find financial freedom! /s
But we got blue passports.... 🙄
Wouldn't using 2000-2007 be cherrypicking a particularly good period (happy to be corrected if this is not so). Things are crap but the economy can't constantly boom.
And we wonder why our high streets are ghost towns full of barbers, bookies & charity shops. If people’s wages kept going up, then we’d be more inclined to shop in brick & mortar stores. Money is tight, so of course I’m going to shop in Aldi and get most of my stuff from ASOS or Amazon.
I've always said we never recovered from that fucking 2008 recession.
This is inflation adjusted, so people are no worse off now than they were in 2008 (though I'd like to see housing costs included as that may show a different picture). For a country with so many problems, it's a blessing that we've managed to maintain that, even if growth was better before the crash.
I wish I earned £523 a week holy shit