Victorian era pay drop

UK workers will have suffered a sixth year in a row of a brutal real-terms pay drop in 2014, making it the longest period of wage decreases since the Victorian era.

 
While Conservatives dream up a supposed “economic recovery,” hoping their best before the general election that they can fool the electorate into thinking everything’s okay, millions of workers know better.

 
Record lows

 
According to the latest ONS figures, average wages grew this year by £1 a week – a rise that was completely wiped out by higher prices.

 
Adjusted for inflation, average wages in fact shrunk by 1.6 per cent, which was the greatest earnings fall since records began in 1997.

 
The top 10 per cent of earners took home, on average, a healthy ÂŁ53,000 a year, while the bottom 10 per cent of earners barely scraped by on an average of ÂŁ15,000 a year. These meagre earnings amounted to less than ÂŁ288 per week.

 
ONS figures further reveal that a shocking 236,000 jobs paid less than the legally mandated national minimum wage.

 
“The Government is making history for the longest fall in real earnings since records began – a time when Queen Victoria was on the throne,” said TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady. “Britain needs a pay rise to end the decline in living standards and to put the spending money in people’s pockets that will keep businesses growing.”

 
Good news?

 
Chancellor George Osborne crowed about the new employment statistics showing a fall in the gender pay gap—perhaps the only thing that can be celebrated in the latest ONS figures.

 
Still, the closing gap was hardly noteworthy—it fell by a meagre 0.6 percentage points, from 10 per cent in 2013 to 9.4 per cent this year.

 
What’s more, the small shrink in the gender pay gap could well be an illusory one. Since women typically take on the majority of low-paid jobs, the reduction in median wages in the latest figures is likely coming from more men being funnelled into low-wage work.

 
This effect would automatically shrink the wage gap, but not because women have made any gains. It’s because both men and women are doing worse.

 
“Numbers don’t lie”

 
Osborne went on to assert in response to the latest earnings report, “The great recession made our country poorer but the only way to improve living standards is to continue working through the plan that’s delivering a brighter economic future.”

The “plan” to which Osborne alludes is ever higher doses of austerity.

 
Indeed, just when we thought we’ve seen the worst of the Tory cuts, prime minister David Cameron recently told the public to brace for more, extolling the virtues of permanent austerity.

 
“Politicians may twist the truth, but numbers don’t lie,” said assistant general secretary Steve Turner. “The undeniable fact is that the current leadership has presided over the longest decline in wages in well over a century.”

 
“The Tories’ plan of continued and permanent austerity, which has only made most of the country worse off, is a perfect example of the saying, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results,’” he added.

Turner argued that specific, Labour-supported policies are the only way out of the nation’s austerity-fuelled race to the bottom.

 
“Austerity hasn’t worked in the last five years and it won’t work in the next five years,” he said. “The only sane thing left to do is elect a Labour government committed to the needs of working people—by raising the minimum wage and promoting strong trade unions, collective bargaining and a powerful voice for working people, democratising decision-making in the boardroom.”

 
“We must address the housing crisis and exploitation of ‘generation rent’ through a programme to build a million social homes, while also forcing cash-flush corporations to pay their fair share in taxes and promoting the creation of skilled, unionised jobs,” Turner added.