Today XpertHR publishes a summary of what has happened to pay awards over the past year, plus a forecast of what will happen in 2010 [subscription required].
Flick through these slides for some of the key findings.
It used to be possible to use the phases "pay rise" and "pay settlement" interchangably, but not any more. This year has been the year of the pay freeze, with one third of all the basic pay awards monitored by IRS over the year to August 2009 giving no pay rise at all.
Our latest data show the median pay award received by employees is now running at a pay freeze - for the first time in the 25 years that we been recording pay settlements on the IRS pay database.
As always, the headline figure does not tell the whole story.
If you weight pay awards by the number of employees actually covered, then the median pay rise is 2.3% (three months to Sept 2009). Some major deals in the retail and public sectors in particular have given employees pay rises in the region of 2% to 3% this year - not bad against inflation that has been below zero since March 2009. But there have been some major pay freezes too -at the Royal Mail, British Telecom, Corus and BP, for example.
The outlook for pay in 2010 is slightly more positive, but depends heavily on the economy improving.
Private sector employers are forecasting a median pay rise of 2% for the coming year. Yet one quarter of employee groups (24.7%) are not expected to get a pay award on the usual date next year (this figure was just 5.9% last year).
As author Janet Egan says: "Our survey suggests that employers are divided between those that plan to continue with a strategy of "battening down the hatches" for another year of pay freezes or moderation and those that are relatively upbeat."
This month's Pay Intelligence also contains an assessment of performance-based pay awards, our analysis of the economic outlook, inflation and earnings forecasts and all the latest bargaining statistics [subscription required].
| Tweet |
|
| Permalink | Email this |
