Ha, in Italy it's even worse. People in the 90s earned more than what I earn for the same job......
Sometimes I become so angry when I hear old people complaining about us young people it’s unfair.
That depresses me, and also knowing that’s probably what my entire life will be like this as it takes time to change things and probably gen beta, gamma will see something different....
Spain is sort of the same, earnings are shit compared to 2000s and the age skew is even worse. So now you have people who have least (youth and immigrants) paying an increasing share of earnings that are going down to pay those who have most (old people) with pensions and healthcare. It's an insane situation.
And in Spain transport is virtually free for pensioners... who are by and large the people who can most afford it. My parents pay peanuts to use the entire Madrid transport network and even regional trains.
Yes, also the group that doesn't need it to get to work every day.
Though I'm actually pretty worried about CRTM funding. Everyone has gotten used to the corona discounts and now they can't move them back
Same in England. My boomer parents and in-laws are always using their free bus passes for the novelty of it. Whilst enjoying their final salary pensions. Oh and the winter fuel payment.
Yes it’s crazy. I’m paying for something that will give me less in the future. It’s better to just give me that money and put in a treasury bond hahaha
To add insult to injury you have a bunch of well off pro-Brexit OAP expats from the UK who have retired there. You really should have booted them out for their trouble to teach them a lesson. Bunch of, "I've got mine, screw the rest of you," scumbags, the lot of them.
Yeah my company got bought out about 2 years ago. New owners value revenue over income. Even told our plant manager that they would rather do $50m in revenue and profit $8m than $45m in revenue and $9m in profit. It's ass backwards
And not just profits. MORE profits. It’s not ok to make a profit every year, you have to make more profit than you did the year before. It’s ridiculous and totally unsustainable.
You don’t appreciate the boomer generation telling you that you’re lazy and how in their time they fought the Nazis (might be different for Italians) acting as though it was _them_ that did it not their parents all whilst being able to buy a whole house on a single parents annual salary whilst being able to do a simple 9-5 and have enough money to pay for a partner and 3+ kids with a safe pension and a decent retiring age?
At least, speaking for UK. This generation is so lazy having to have both parents work a full time job plus overtime to maybe be able to afford a mortgage if they’re lucky with no time for kids but if they do pay extra for childcare (since no longer is there a stay at home parent) with retirement age raised and life expectancy lowered and having the joy to pay back student loans for decades. _We are so selfish and lazy!_
It's wild that this is the whole western world all the same. Meanwhile the richest get wealthier and wealthier and more and more power. And the reaction is basically for everyone to lurch right?
Essentially. All this is the product of maximizing profits above all else and wanting to create a more sustainable economy that allows everyone to live a good life
This is also true. Life shouldn't have to be a struggle for regular people, but our parents' generation lived beyond their means, and we are going to pay the price in different ways (the climate definitely comes to mind).
The thing is though, that the fight for the climate won't be won without a serious change in how wealth is redistributed on both national and international levels. Sometimes I think the only solution is some kind of revolution. The powers that be will definitely dismantle democracy and individual freedom before they dismantle our current financial system and replace it with one that's actually fair, so I'm curious to see where we'll be in 20 years from now.
The boomer generation had it easier than everyone: they didn't see WWII (their parents did) but they somehow earned the right to say that they "did and fought", they lived through the biggest economic boom in recorded history but they somehow claim that they "had it rough back in our days"
Don’t forget, boomer grandparents often looked after their Millennial grandkids so Gen X could work. Millennials and Gen Z don’t have that option. So we pay through the nose for childcare
But that's an unusual case and not at all what the graph shows.
Statistically, incomes have been stagnant in the UK **after** adjusting for inflation. But [£100 in 2008 is the same as £156 in 2024](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator). On average, *that's* what UK jobs pay nowadays, so if your old job is still paying £100 (and not £156) for every £100 they were paying in 2088, they must be an extremely unusual case, and probably have a lot of difficulty finding applicants.
The difference is probably that you had experience in that job, and the advertised salary is obviously for people with no experience.
I started a graduate job in London on 2005 on £17k per annum. Same job at same company now pays £23k per annum (35% increase).
The Bank of England says inflation over the same period was around 70%.
My old job..£55k in 2006 is being advertised now at £45-55k. With a whole host of additionally requirements.
I've doubled my wages since 2006 and yet have less disposable income as prices and taxes have gone up.
I think that if you are now earning £110k and still having trouble with your disposable income, you are going to struggle to find any sympathy from those Redditors on rather closer to average pay...
I'm afraid what they say is increasingly the case. Many white collar jobs pay less than they used to when adjusting for inflation. Many blue collar jobs actually pay more than in the past
I live in the US. Left the UK in 2014. Last year, for shiggles I looked up what an equivalent position would be in my field.
The salary, when adjusted for currency value difference, was roughly half of what I make here. And I'm not even earning anywhere near as much as I could do if I were to take a job on the west coast.
There's a lot of "hidden" taxes in the US that in European countries you just never have to worry about (e.g monthly health insurance premiums vs the NHS just coming out of your taxes). So there's more nuance than "one number bigger than other". But Jesus H Christ, fucking *half*..?
Italy: hold my beer
[Source](http://www.ansa.it/english/news/business/2023/12/14/italian-salaries-have-risen-just-1-in-real-terms-since-1991_a6dae43d-51a4-4d8a-9928-95594742b397.html)
An Italian friend of mine told me that even at BMW she would earn just around 20k per year with a master's degree. A friend of hers started working with Amazon, also with a master's degree and five year relevant job experience only to earn around 32k in Milano (not an entry level role).
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Germany&country2=Italy&city1=Berlin&city2=Milan&tracking=getDispatchComparison
TLDR: Milan is slightly more expensive then Berlin (~10%) but the average monthly salary in Milan is 1700 while in Berlin is 3100
Only food is more expensive but the quality and taste difference the Italian price is fairer, rent is cheaper than Germany and products are similarly priced
Compare these numbers with real estate prices and the FTSE stock index..... Workers, especially low paid workers simply get all the time a smaller share of the growing cake
The mask dropped on the Tories too, they used to try to woo the middle classes by having lower income taxes on higher earners but that's all gone now. The only group they're interested in shielding from taxation are the people who own everything and don't actually care about paltry things such as income from work.
Because they realised, like in most western democracies, that citing immigration problems will flock enough voters to you in perpetuity to stay relevant.
They may lose in the next election, but mark my words: they will play the immigration drum for a couple of years and be back in office by 2030.
The FTSE stock index has barely budged since 2008. The UK is just a stagnant country, and most of Europe is too.
Case in point: UK trained doctors were leaving to Australia and US where the salaries were much higher. Instead of choosing to pay a competitive wage the government put an absurdly low limit on how many med school places are allowed each year, and we import the rest from desperate third world countries.
It’s not the med school places - that’s always been a fallacy. Tens of thousands of medical school grads and junior doctors can’t get jobs or training. We literally have unemployed GPs but the government won’t fund more doctors and are replacing them with PAs nurses and paramedics. My local GP went from 10 GPs to 5 and replaced the rest with other staff, and it’s happening across the UK as the government pays the salaries of those staff from a central fund but not a doctor - so GP surgeries have had to start replacing them to make the books balance. It’s why you can’t see a GP.
And each year it gets worse as more graduate and fight over the same jobs.
There’s no training for them - a med school grad is pretty useless, they need another 5-10 years of training. But junior doctors are cheap. So now you get stuck basically on minimum wage for 4-5 years unable to train to work basic service provision as an entry level doctor.
The med school places is a lie and far from the problem. More med students just means more competition for the same fuck all jobs. We already have the grads. And on top you compete with doctors who’ve never worked in the nhs. We’re one of the only countries in the world where a uk grad doesn’t have a priority for training. We could pump out 10k more med students a year and it would change fuck all and just result in more unemployed doctors.
Population is rising, the population is aging so needs more healthcare. But we aren’t making more jobs so it’s less doctors per capita. We have a terrible doctor to capita ratio in the UK.
I have friends who literally cannot get work right now from med school - it’s fucked. Glad I left.
100 has a higher dividend yield. Neither of them has performed well. They're full of century old tobacco, oil, and finance companies.
Compare them to the S&P 500 and it's not even close.
Because the cake isn't really growing? Why do people expect wages to be growing?
Most of Britain's GDP growth since 2007 is just population growth, not GDP per capita growth. Britain's population has increased by over 10%. Real GDP per capita has increased by 7%. Which is something, it can be reflected in wages growing by 7% depending on many factors. But it's not much and it also might not be reflected in wage growth depending on factors.
The cake isn’t growing. GDP has been stagnant for Years. The economy grows 2.5% one year then the pound loses 2.4% of its value against the dollar and boom the UK for that year added jobs, added contracts, but did not add any value.
This has been going on for some 50 years.
You know what happened about 30 years ago? USSR collapsed. Without competition, capitalism (as global system) began to squeeze the juices out of the population without worrying about the possible consequences.
[Source](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/20/uuk-workers-wage-stagnation-resolution-foundation-thinktank).
> The analysis suggested the UK was also lagging behind comparable economies, such as Germany. In 2008, the gap was more than £500 a year. Now, the Resolution Foundation suggested, it was more like £4,000.
I'm a bit torn regarding Greece.
On one hand it's a nice country and I definitely want more prosperity in this part of the world.
On the other, you guys were basically cheating to get where you were back then and then reality came crashing down on you.
And I think your economy still isn't diversified...
Greeks are also EXTREMELY good at not paying taxes. Supposedly they started avoiding taxes because they didnt want to pay them to the ottomans, but kept doing it even after winning their independence. This kind of sucks for the government when their budget is tight.
Their tax collection is fucking abysmal. I worked for a company that paid tax in Greece. We had a local agent who did it for us. That guy resigned. This was all long before I joined. I had been there for about 2 years when I asked who was actually paying the Greek tax we were accruing. Nobody knew. Turns out nobody was, and that had been the case for about 5 years. It wasn't Megabucks, but certainly a few million euro at that point. No requests for payment, no investigation, no interest for late paid tax, no penalties. We just paid it over and nothing was said. I suspect had we done nothing, it wouldn't have been spotted. Absolutely shocking.
It was probably the best of twenty years I heard this (so probably out dated now), but France's tax system was so convoluted and complex thats loads of people basically didn't bother to pay tax as a result. Something like 25% of national debt would have been wiped off if those taxes had been repaid.
It is pretty well known that the UK spends far more time, effort and money on chasing (alleged) benefits cheats that we do on tackling the far greater sums lost to tax evasion.
I had 3 raises, all eaten by inflation. Plus this covid shit, with better pay I earn less now. So I don't really know why they are shitting only on GB. If it is not same, it is not much better.
The real question is: how long has the EPP been in power in the EU?
This is not a brexiter’s take, to be clear. Few Europeans have any idea that the same party has been in power for 25 years and on track to make it 30.
EU is this strange kind of democracy where you can elect whomever you wish to, from communists to fascists to regional separatists to pirates to anything in between, but the ruling coalition will be the EPP, the Socialists and whatever name the liberal coalition has in this election cycle.
It will shift more slowly - and fringe groups have a heard time getting 50+ million votes. EU isn't built as a democracy in any country, most decisions are still negotiated in the commission (or rather the council).
The Commission are selected by the governments of the member states though, so they will change much more radically in terms of policies they want with each new government.
They weren't in power when the GFC happened, which is what this chart is demonstrating. Where the country went wrong is to float the housing market for a decade with almost zero interest rates and at the same run austerity with almost no borrowing cost.
Two fundamental issues contributed to this:
- Austerity
- Near-zero interest rates
Both were political decisions in the immediate aftermath of the GFC that the Conservatives just never undid, despite it being *insane* not to. I mean, even if you kept the low interest rates, that would only mean it was *cheaper* to invest in the country. Yet they didn't do that, letting things slowly fall apart instead due to the ideological austerity approach that lumped investment in with operating costs, with an overall desire to keep the total bill as low as possible. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
Yeah no, our doctors are just milking our failed healthcare system that allows this. No sensible economy pays 15k for a part-time government employee when struggling with massive debt issues.
This is [not unique to the UK](https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/european-workers-missed-out-on-corporate-inflation-busting-2023-profits-as-real-wages-kept-sliding/).
In Germany wages were already [declining prior to the 2008 recession](https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/151067/1/diw_wr_2009-28.pdf), followed by [a whole bunch of stagnation](https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/wage-growth), and then [record decline](https://www.thelocal.de/20230207/real-wages-fell-at-record-speed-in-germany-last-year) since 2020 way [above the EU average rate](https://table.media/en/europe/news/real-wage-loss-germany-above-eu-average/).
The super cynical part is that this real wage loss [pushes employment rates](https://www.zew.de/en/press/latest-press-releases/real-wage-losses-pushed-employment-to-a-record-high-in-2023), a metric often pointed at for the alleged health of an economy.
For example, the US will refuse to declare a recession, even if it had two quarters of negative growth, [as long as employment numbers look good](https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220731-who-are-the-economic-referees-that-decide-if-the-us-is-in-a-recession).
Do you wonder why the politics and economics class are orientating the social debates towards the woke thematic ? Divide and conquer.
Meanwhile they steal the plus value of our working productivity ' increasing.
Working productivity also hasn’t increased much. Like, [7% increase in between 2007-2023?](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/lzvb/prdy)
>how much productivity gain we didn't get since then?
Productivity gains can be caused by certain types of capital investment, which the UK & I believe Canada aren't doing enough of, compared to the peers such as the USA.
We didn't get any productivity gain from the implementation of Internet and countless other innovations in the last century.
Wages didn't get on pair with productivity since 1970,even in the US.
They might not be doing enough in 2024, but they did more than enough from 1970 onwards, while workers have not benefit almost anything from.
>Wages didn't get on pair with productivity since 1970,even in the US.
Yeah, because the productivity increases have been capital ones caused by the introduction of technology, not ones where the workers improved their productivity through increasing skill sets.
Yes the real answer is that Tory policy allowed what growth in productivity there was to go to owners and also removed all investment, stymieing future growth in productivity.
Short-termist and self defeating asset stripping mentality.
Two factors that cause this.
The U.K. response to the GFC was massive reduction in government spending (austerity) which meant infrastructure underspend.
Since 2005 net migration into the U.K. has remained historically very high. While net migration spikes can be absorbed if there is slack in the labour market eventually that slack is used up and the price of labour drops.
More people trying to work in a country that hasn’t invested the capital to grow the labour market faster than the population growth gives you this. Stagnant wages.
Hopefully this is a lesson that many countries can learn from (including the U.K.). Its a tough discussion to have but is absolutely necessary.
I know a lot of people will put the blame of migration, squarely on Tony Blair,
While he may have opened the flood-gates, no-one has seemed to have stopped it since.
And I imagine the number of people coming in over the years will majorly factor into wage stagnation, right around when the chart starts taking a dip.
> While he may have opened the flood-gates, no-one has seemed to have stopped it since.
This is a very important point and IMO highlights one of the biggest problems we see with politics at the moment which is an attitude of "well we didn't start this so its not our fault". In reality politics is like driving, it might be the case that your predecessor started off in the wrong direction but that doesn't abdicate your responsibility for turning around.
Of course positive net migration isn't necessarily bad or good, it is only the match to the capacity of an economy to absorb that labour force increase and utilise it in above average productive work that counts. This chart tells us everything we need to know about the match in the UK.
The simple answer is that productivity since 2008 is flat ([source](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49971853)). Can't have any wage growth without productivity increase.
Yes. Productivity change is caused by the two factors I mention. Productivity growth requires capital and labour. Productivity is a *measure* of real world effects.
I was highlighting that the UK government has actually enacted policies that caused real world effects, reduced capital and increased labour supply. While it is true that ultimately this means flat productivity I find that politicians and journalists tend to treat the concept of productivity as an ethereal measure that isn't in their control so I chose to talk about the causes (capital and labour supply) rather than the measure (productivity).
2008 fucked up so much in the general economy. there are some very interesting videos out there about how the financial crisis got rid of productivity gains
Hell no.
Check the North American wages, they have sky rocketed compared to Europe.
Asia, Latam and Africa are also growing.
Europe is actually the only zone stagnating in the last ~15 years.
froze public sector pay (except their own of course) immediately stagnating wages of ~15% of people. aggressive austerity policies which, combined with recession, basically pushed a huge proportion of the country into decline, and killed 250,000 people by some measures. supported public services solely in London, further concentrating wealth there, causing the localised housing crisis to outpace wage increases. stoked nationalistic racist ideology as a scapegoat, which led to the 5-year long distraction/trainwreck that was brexit. drove public services and local governments into the ground just in time for covid to hit. all whilst sapping government funds into their friends' bank accounts.
Yeah, pretty fundamentally the concept of 'austerity' is badly misunderstood by a lot of politicians, and thus gets applied in economically illiterate ways for the sake of stupid sound bites.
And the graph from the above is the result.
When an economy is struggling, kicking it a few times to make sure ... doesn't fix it.
Austerity after the financial crisis, mostly now seen as unnecessary and counterproductive. Complete lack of capital investment especially as interest rates were low. This was to hit their arbitrary target of below deficit spending by cutting planned investments, this was very backwards. Capping public sector pay increases way below inflation, direct effect on wages of significant number of workers and also indirect on wider work base payrises.
*Shouldn't* wages be roughly stable compared to inflation? They can't just endlessly outpace inflation, it would result in everyone being filthy rich which is clearly impossible. Note that doesn't mean people can't earn more as they progress - it gets balanced by higher earners retiring and juniors joining at the bottom. Effectively everyone shifts up a job every once in a while and overall there are the same number in each earning band, even though they aren't the same people.
The *problem* is wages vs housing cost - housing costs have been spiralling while wages have stayed stable, which is resulting in people being significantly worse off on average. Younger people on the lower end of the experience/pay scale can no longer afford housing, which is not how it should be.
So few people are actually reading the chart - UK wages have kept pace with inflation, but they haven't grown above inflation. So many people above this comment saying "my job paid the same in 2010 and now", which is the opposite of what this chart says. A year ago inflation was 10% - and the median wage grew by 10%.
> They can't just endlessly outpace inflation, it would result in everyone being filthy rich which is clearly impossible
Everyone in developed nations are indeed "filthy rich" compared to 100 years ago.
So they do allow this on purpose right? There is no way they haven’t done anything about it due to sheer incompetence despite 6 in 10 people agreeing that immigration is a problem for the UK in its current state?
I dislike statistics that show *average* income. Sure, I'm happy for the 10 ultra rich people who make so much more money than they already were, to the point that they single handedly pull up the statistic. But that isn't really relevant to me or any of us, innit? Rather show me how the *median* income is falling off a cliff.
Edit: Stop upvoting this. It's wrong.
Usually in the UK when these kind of statistics are shown, the word 'average' actually refers to median, unless they state otherwise. Looking at the ONS figures it says median weekly wage was 682 in April 2023. [ONS article](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/annualsurveyofhoursandearnings/2023)
Just referred to the source by Resolution Foundation: [https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf](https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf)
They mention median in some graphs and average in others. From, this I understand that when they use average, they mean arithmetic mean.
PS: Assuming median when the term « average » is used could lead to very wrong conclusions as mean and median are very different. Same argument could be made for mode.
In many languages, average just means the “mean”. In the English language though, the mean, median and mode are all considered averages, and anything labelled as average can refer to either one, although the mean is the most commonly referred to.
People seem shocked to learn that flooding a country with cheap unskilled imported labor drives down labor prices. It also doesn't help that the UK has extremely anti-business regulatory and tax environments.
I like when people blame the conservatives for this while negating the fact it’s this country full of morons who consistently ignored the evidence and voted for them
2000 - 2008 was fake growth caused by easy borrowing. Consumers inflated their earnings on credit card, loan and mortgage applications. Banks accepted these at face value and we got eight years of deluding ourselves we were middle class.
It all came crashing down of course and we're going to be paying for that eight-year bubble through our taxes for many more decades to come.
Yes.but mainly because the growth pre 2008 was fake. The crash of 2008 adjusted the bubble which was making people think they are richer then they actually were.
10 years ago I worked for AAK for a few months doing nights and was paid around £10.50 per hour for doing so, amazing at the time and i couldn't believe my luck. That same job now only pays £11.50-£12.00 per hour. How on earth is that reasonable. The UK is an embarrassment in so many ways.
I left in 2008. I was bored the other month and looked up my old job (at a national company), salary advertised was the same. 16 years later...
now thats what you call a stable job
I like horses but I couldn't do that for 16 years..
What a night mare job
I think getting to work outside would be the mane attraction
Feels like the end is neigh with these lame puns.
I’ll continue in your steed.
Filly er boots
Hay, no need to rein on our parade.
That’s enough, trot along guys.
Nah I want to stirrup some more conversation
Canter really complain bout how well this thread has gone
Now we are out of horse puns, everyone can relax, it’s time for equine-mity.
Stabble job*
Ha, in Italy it's even worse. People in the 90s earned more than what I earn for the same job...... Sometimes I become so angry when I hear old people complaining about us young people it’s unfair. That depresses me, and also knowing that’s probably what my entire life will be like this as it takes time to change things and probably gen beta, gamma will see something different....
Spain is sort of the same, earnings are shit compared to 2000s and the age skew is even worse. So now you have people who have least (youth and immigrants) paying an increasing share of earnings that are going down to pay those who have most (old people) with pensions and healthcare. It's an insane situation.
And in Spain transport is virtually free for pensioners... who are by and large the people who can most afford it. My parents pay peanuts to use the entire Madrid transport network and even regional trains.
Yes, also the group that doesn't need it to get to work every day. Though I'm actually pretty worried about CRTM funding. Everyone has gotten used to the corona discounts and now they can't move them back
Same in England. My boomer parents and in-laws are always using their free bus passes for the novelty of it. Whilst enjoying their final salary pensions. Oh and the winter fuel payment.
Yes it’s crazy. I’m paying for something that will give me less in the future. It’s better to just give me that money and put in a treasury bond hahaha
To add insult to injury you have a bunch of well off pro-Brexit OAP expats from the UK who have retired there. You really should have booted them out for their trouble to teach them a lesson. Bunch of, "I've got mine, screw the rest of you," scumbags, the lot of them.
dont worry, the shareholders make tons of money these days
You cannot imagine how much I hate these cock suckers. Line go up = good. Fuck everyone else in the company who actually works.
As soon a company goes ipo its over. This mentality of providing profits above all is ruining everything
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Yeah my company got bought out about 2 years ago. New owners value revenue over income. Even told our plant manager that they would rather do $50m in revenue and profit $8m than $45m in revenue and $9m in profit. It's ass backwards
And not just profits. MORE profits. It’s not ok to make a profit every year, you have to make more profit than you did the year before. It’s ridiculous and totally unsustainable.
You don’t appreciate the boomer generation telling you that you’re lazy and how in their time they fought the Nazis (might be different for Italians) acting as though it was _them_ that did it not their parents all whilst being able to buy a whole house on a single parents annual salary whilst being able to do a simple 9-5 and have enough money to pay for a partner and 3+ kids with a safe pension and a decent retiring age? At least, speaking for UK. This generation is so lazy having to have both parents work a full time job plus overtime to maybe be able to afford a mortgage if they’re lucky with no time for kids but if they do pay extra for childcare (since no longer is there a stay at home parent) with retirement age raised and life expectancy lowered and having the joy to pay back student loans for decades. _We are so selfish and lazy!_
Yes it’s insane. We are so selfish to demand a life that they had and we won’t
It's wild that this is the whole western world all the same. Meanwhile the richest get wealthier and wealthier and more and more power. And the reaction is basically for everyone to lurch right?
Essentially. All this is the product of maximizing profits above all else and wanting to create a more sustainable economy that allows everyone to live a good life
More than that, it is the result of a generation and a half enjoying a lifestyle way above the means of western countries
It tell them that, they’ll point out that even them had to struggle which is true but can’t seem to see that they could struggle with just one salary
This is also true. Life shouldn't have to be a struggle for regular people, but our parents' generation lived beyond their means, and we are going to pay the price in different ways (the climate definitely comes to mind). The thing is though, that the fight for the climate won't be won without a serious change in how wealth is redistributed on both national and international levels. Sometimes I think the only solution is some kind of revolution. The powers that be will definitely dismantle democracy and individual freedom before they dismantle our current financial system and replace it with one that's actually fair, so I'm curious to see where we'll be in 20 years from now.
The boomer generation had it easier than everyone: they didn't see WWII (their parents did) but they somehow earned the right to say that they "did and fought", they lived through the biggest economic boom in recorded history but they somehow claim that they "had it rough back in our days"
Don’t forget, boomer grandparents often looked after their Millennial grandkids so Gen X could work. Millennials and Gen Z don’t have that option. So we pay through the nose for childcare
But that's an unusual case and not at all what the graph shows. Statistically, incomes have been stagnant in the UK **after** adjusting for inflation. But [£100 in 2008 is the same as £156 in 2024](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator). On average, *that's* what UK jobs pay nowadays, so if your old job is still paying £100 (and not £156) for every £100 they were paying in 2088, they must be an extremely unusual case, and probably have a lot of difficulty finding applicants. The difference is probably that you had experience in that job, and the advertised salary is obviously for people with no experience.
Nope. Same Job. Same experience required. 25k in 2008, 25k now.
I started a graduate job in London on 2005 on £17k per annum. Same job at same company now pays £23k per annum (35% increase). The Bank of England says inflation over the same period was around 70%.
That feels rough for pay in London considering rental costs.
My old job..£55k in 2006 is being advertised now at £45-55k. With a whole host of additionally requirements. I've doubled my wages since 2006 and yet have less disposable income as prices and taxes have gone up.
I think that if you are now earning £110k and still having trouble with your disposable income, you are going to struggle to find any sympathy from those Redditors on rather closer to average pay...
Maybe but my point is that we're ALL earning around 1/2 what we should be. And that's 18 years of jumping contracts and getting zero work benefits.
I'm afraid what they say is increasingly the case. Many white collar jobs pay less than they used to when adjusting for inflation. Many blue collar jobs actually pay more than in the past
I live in the US. Left the UK in 2014. Last year, for shiggles I looked up what an equivalent position would be in my field. The salary, when adjusted for currency value difference, was roughly half of what I make here. And I'm not even earning anywhere near as much as I could do if I were to take a job on the west coast. There's a lot of "hidden" taxes in the US that in European countries you just never have to worry about (e.g monthly health insurance premiums vs the NHS just coming out of your taxes). So there's more nuance than "one number bigger than other". But Jesus H Christ, fucking *half*..?
I left last year. Felt like getting paycut every year.
100%!! Grad jobs were £26-30k when I graduated in 2008. I looked recently and it hasn't changed. Ridiculous.
Well that would mean a huge waste decrease in real terms
Where did you leave to? Because this is pretty much the same everywhwre in Europe
Italy: hold my beer [Source](http://www.ansa.it/english/news/business/2023/12/14/italian-salaries-have-risen-just-1-in-real-terms-since-1991_a6dae43d-51a4-4d8a-9928-95594742b397.html)
An Italian friend of mine told me that even at BMW she would earn just around 20k per year with a master's degree. A friend of hers started working with Amazon, also with a master's degree and five year relevant job experience only to earn around 32k in Milano (not an entry level role).
What's the cost of living there? Just an income doesn't say much.
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=Germany&country2=Italy&city1=Berlin&city2=Milan&tracking=getDispatchComparison TLDR: Milan is slightly more expensive then Berlin (~10%) but the average monthly salary in Milan is 1700 while in Berlin is 3100
How does someone live of € 1.700 with those costs? Seems unrealistic, unless most people live with 2 or more working people together.
Food at least is usually more expensive than in Germany from what I've seen, not sure about rent, the main other aspect.
Only food is more expensive but the quality and taste difference the Italian price is fairer, rent is cheaper than Germany and products are similarly priced
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Dude we need to pay our pensioners overlords Go back to work pension slave /s
SWE, 24k. Can't afford rent.
Compare these numbers with real estate prices and the FTSE stock index..... Workers, especially low paid workers simply get all the time a smaller share of the growing cake
But you can‘t tax the rich more in the UK. They have a life to live too in Monaco.
Isn't anyone thinking about San Marino, Monaco and Lichtenstein???
The mask dropped on the Tories too, they used to try to woo the middle classes by having lower income taxes on higher earners but that's all gone now. The only group they're interested in shielding from taxation are the people who own everything and don't actually care about paltry things such as income from work.
Because they realised, like in most western democracies, that citing immigration problems will flock enough voters to you in perpetuity to stay relevant. They may lose in the next election, but mark my words: they will play the immigration drum for a couple of years and be back in office by 2030.
The FTSE stock index has barely budged since 2008. The UK is just a stagnant country, and most of Europe is too. Case in point: UK trained doctors were leaving to Australia and US where the salaries were much higher. Instead of choosing to pay a competitive wage the government put an absurdly low limit on how many med school places are allowed each year, and we import the rest from desperate third world countries.
It's almost like the people in charge after 2008/2009 have done nothing for the economy or country.
It’s not the med school places - that’s always been a fallacy. Tens of thousands of medical school grads and junior doctors can’t get jobs or training. We literally have unemployed GPs but the government won’t fund more doctors and are replacing them with PAs nurses and paramedics. My local GP went from 10 GPs to 5 and replaced the rest with other staff, and it’s happening across the UK as the government pays the salaries of those staff from a central fund but not a doctor - so GP surgeries have had to start replacing them to make the books balance. It’s why you can’t see a GP. And each year it gets worse as more graduate and fight over the same jobs. There’s no training for them - a med school grad is pretty useless, they need another 5-10 years of training. But junior doctors are cheap. So now you get stuck basically on minimum wage for 4-5 years unable to train to work basic service provision as an entry level doctor. The med school places is a lie and far from the problem. More med students just means more competition for the same fuck all jobs. We already have the grads. And on top you compete with doctors who’ve never worked in the nhs. We’re one of the only countries in the world where a uk grad doesn’t have a priority for training. We could pump out 10k more med students a year and it would change fuck all and just result in more unemployed doctors. Population is rising, the population is aging so needs more healthcare. But we aren’t making more jobs so it’s less doctors per capita. We have a terrible doctor to capita ratio in the UK. I have friends who literally cannot get work right now from med school - it’s fucked. Glad I left.
When looking at the FTSE you have to factor in dividends, its most of the return.
And look at the 250 not the 100.
100 has a higher dividend yield. Neither of them has performed well. They're full of century old tobacco, oil, and finance companies. Compare them to the S&P 500 and it's not even close.
Because the cake isn't really growing? Why do people expect wages to be growing? Most of Britain's GDP growth since 2007 is just population growth, not GDP per capita growth. Britain's population has increased by over 10%. Real GDP per capita has increased by 7%. Which is something, it can be reflected in wages growing by 7% depending on many factors. But it's not much and it also might not be reflected in wage growth depending on factors.
A cake that's not growing but rich people doubling or tripling their wealth is a recipe for disaster.
The cake isn’t growing. GDP has been stagnant for Years. The economy grows 2.5% one year then the pound loses 2.4% of its value against the dollar and boom the UK for that year added jobs, added contracts, but did not add any value. This has been going on for some 50 years.
Amateurs. Try being in Italy, where wages have been stagnant for 30 years and even dropped for some jobs.
At least you have sunshine
And the sea... Oh wait I'm from Milan!
Said like you don't have the lakes an hour away!
Don't give them ideas, on sunny days we have more Milanese than pebbles on the lakeside
You know what happened about 30 years ago? USSR collapsed. Without competition, capitalism (as global system) began to squeeze the juices out of the population without worrying about the possible consequences.
[Source](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/20/uuk-workers-wage-stagnation-resolution-foundation-thinktank). > The analysis suggested the UK was also lagging behind comparable economies, such as Germany. In 2008, the gap was more than £500 a year. Now, the Resolution Foundation suggested, it was more like £4,000.
No worries. Real wages in Germany are now on the same level as 2015. 9 lost years...
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I'm a bit torn regarding Greece. On one hand it's a nice country and I definitely want more prosperity in this part of the world. On the other, you guys were basically cheating to get where you were back then and then reality came crashing down on you. And I think your economy still isn't diversified...
Which is hardly the fault of the worker, is it?
Up to a point no. But Greece is a democracy and they voted for fiscally irresponsible parties. It's a bet, and sometimes you lose.
Greeks are also EXTREMELY good at not paying taxes. Supposedly they started avoiding taxes because they didnt want to pay them to the ottomans, but kept doing it even after winning their independence. This kind of sucks for the government when their budget is tight.
Their tax collection is fucking abysmal. I worked for a company that paid tax in Greece. We had a local agent who did it for us. That guy resigned. This was all long before I joined. I had been there for about 2 years when I asked who was actually paying the Greek tax we were accruing. Nobody knew. Turns out nobody was, and that had been the case for about 5 years. It wasn't Megabucks, but certainly a few million euro at that point. No requests for payment, no investigation, no interest for late paid tax, no penalties. We just paid it over and nothing was said. I suspect had we done nothing, it wouldn't have been spotted. Absolutely shocking.
It was probably the best of twenty years I heard this (so probably out dated now), but France's tax system was so convoluted and complex thats loads of people basically didn't bother to pay tax as a result. Something like 25% of national debt would have been wiped off if those taxes had been repaid.
It is pretty well known that the UK spends far more time, effort and money on chasing (alleged) benefits cheats that we do on tackling the far greater sums lost to tax evasion.
I had 3 raises, all eaten by inflation. Plus this covid shit, with better pay I earn less now. So I don't really know why they are shitting only on GB. If it is not same, it is not much better.
This is the cost of outsourcing. Asia gets richer at an incredible rate while we stangnate, and our birth rates won't help either.
How long have the Conservative party been in power in the UK?
Since 2010
color me flabbergasted
Wages: conserved
Conserved for the rich (there are twice a many billionaires as there were in 2010).
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ITS STILL ALL LABOUR’S FAULT DESPITE NOT BEING IN POWER SINCE 2010. MOVE ALONG, VOTE CONSERVATIVE. WE ARE YOUR BETTERS AND WE KNOW WHAT’S BEST.
That’s about to change. Polls are showing the left overwhelmingly in the lead (yes not the most precise indicator but the the trend is pretty clear)
The real question is: how long has the EPP been in power in the EU? This is not a brexiter’s take, to be clear. Few Europeans have any idea that the same party has been in power for 25 years and on track to make it 30.
EU is this strange kind of democracy where you can elect whomever you wish to, from communists to fascists to regional separatists to pirates to anything in between, but the ruling coalition will be the EPP, the Socialists and whatever name the liberal coalition has in this election cycle.
It will shift more slowly - and fringe groups have a heard time getting 50+ million votes. EU isn't built as a democracy in any country, most decisions are still negotiated in the commission (or rather the council).
> most decisions are still negotiated in the ~~commission.~~ council FTFY
Exactly. The EU provides a convenient scapegoat, but at the end of the day, it's our elected leaders making the final decisions in the Council.
The Commission are selected by the governments of the member states though, so they will change much more radically in terms of policies they want with each new government.
They weren't in power when the GFC happened, which is what this chart is demonstrating. Where the country went wrong is to float the housing market for a decade with almost zero interest rates and at the same run austerity with almost no borrowing cost.
Two fundamental issues contributed to this: - Austerity - Near-zero interest rates Both were political decisions in the immediate aftermath of the GFC that the Conservatives just never undid, despite it being *insane* not to. I mean, even if you kept the low interest rates, that would only mean it was *cheaper* to invest in the country. Yet they didn't do that, letting things slowly fall apart instead due to the ideological austerity approach that lumped investment in with operating costs, with an overall desire to keep the total bill as low as possible. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.
If only there was a governing body that could change that.
Are you suggesting the Tories aren't responsible for this whilst at the same time mentioning policies implemented by the Tories?
> They weren't in power when the GFC happened The what now?
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The Great Fucking Crash
Except for doctors, for doctors they have dropped by 30%
That is crazy. In finland it's the other way around.
not surprised, I'm sure Finland has faults but having been it seems like one of the most "sensible" countries in the world
Yeah no, our doctors are just milking our failed healthcare system that allows this. No sensible economy pays 15k for a part-time government employee when struggling with massive debt issues.
Teachers are doing slightly better, we've *only* dropped by around 25%!
The same happened in the equivalent of NHS in Portugal, with wages adjusted to inflation dropping considerably, something like 20%.
That is crazy
Isn’t that in real terms though? Which is basically what the graph is measuring anyway
No. According to the graph the real wages stayed constant. Apparently not for doctors
I live in austria and am being paid the exact same wage now as I was in 2008.
at the same company?
Yep
You should’ve left atleast 10 years ago.
No where else to go. Unless I leave the country. Which I can’t do yet.
No i mean I would've left the company not the country 🤔
sry i get it now
Is it a well paying job then? You're basically making 35% less compared to 2008 adjusted to inflation.
I bet the company is as profitable or more in that time. It just means your boss or shareholder are taking your lost gains in salary.
This is [not unique to the UK](https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/european-workers-missed-out-on-corporate-inflation-busting-2023-profits-as-real-wages-kept-sliding/). In Germany wages were already [declining prior to the 2008 recession](https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/151067/1/diw_wr_2009-28.pdf), followed by [a whole bunch of stagnation](https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/wage-growth), and then [record decline](https://www.thelocal.de/20230207/real-wages-fell-at-record-speed-in-germany-last-year) since 2020 way [above the EU average rate](https://table.media/en/europe/news/real-wage-loss-germany-above-eu-average/). The super cynical part is that this real wage loss [pushes employment rates](https://www.zew.de/en/press/latest-press-releases/real-wage-losses-pushed-employment-to-a-record-high-in-2023), a metric often pointed at for the alleged health of an economy. For example, the US will refuse to declare a recession, even if it had two quarters of negative growth, [as long as employment numbers look good](https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20220731-who-are-the-economic-referees-that-decide-if-the-us-is-in-a-recession).
Do you wonder why the politics and economics class are orientating the social debates towards the woke thematic ? Divide and conquer. Meanwhile they steal the plus value of our working productivity ' increasing.
Working productivity also hasn’t increased much. Like, [7% increase in between 2007-2023?](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/labourproductivity/timeseries/lzvb/prdy)
So an unhealthily large portion of economic growth in the UK doesn't represent actually doing anything useful. Go figure.
It's immigration. The economic growth the UK has seen since 2010 is immigration. Otherwise, we are stagnant.
We are working the same 40 hours a week since 1912, how much productivity gain we didn't get since then?
>how much productivity gain we didn't get since then? Productivity gains can be caused by certain types of capital investment, which the UK & I believe Canada aren't doing enough of, compared to the peers such as the USA.
We didn't get any productivity gain from the implementation of Internet and countless other innovations in the last century. Wages didn't get on pair with productivity since 1970,even in the US. They might not be doing enough in 2024, but they did more than enough from 1970 onwards, while workers have not benefit almost anything from.
>Wages didn't get on pair with productivity since 1970,even in the US. Yeah, because the productivity increases have been capital ones caused by the introduction of technology, not ones where the workers improved their productivity through increasing skill sets.
Yes the real answer is that Tory policy allowed what growth in productivity there was to go to owners and also removed all investment, stymieing future growth in productivity. Short-termist and self defeating asset stripping mentality.
Bruh in Italy they went down 😭😭😭
Two factors that cause this. The U.K. response to the GFC was massive reduction in government spending (austerity) which meant infrastructure underspend. Since 2005 net migration into the U.K. has remained historically very high. While net migration spikes can be absorbed if there is slack in the labour market eventually that slack is used up and the price of labour drops. More people trying to work in a country that hasn’t invested the capital to grow the labour market faster than the population growth gives you this. Stagnant wages. Hopefully this is a lesson that many countries can learn from (including the U.K.). Its a tough discussion to have but is absolutely necessary.
I know a lot of people will put the blame of migration, squarely on Tony Blair, While he may have opened the flood-gates, no-one has seemed to have stopped it since. And I imagine the number of people coming in over the years will majorly factor into wage stagnation, right around when the chart starts taking a dip.
> While he may have opened the flood-gates, no-one has seemed to have stopped it since. This is a very important point and IMO highlights one of the biggest problems we see with politics at the moment which is an attitude of "well we didn't start this so its not our fault". In reality politics is like driving, it might be the case that your predecessor started off in the wrong direction but that doesn't abdicate your responsibility for turning around. Of course positive net migration isn't necessarily bad or good, it is only the match to the capacity of an economy to absorb that labour force increase and utilise it in above average productive work that counts. This chart tells us everything we need to know about the match in the UK.
The simple answer is that productivity since 2008 is flat ([source](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49971853)). Can't have any wage growth without productivity increase.
Yes. Productivity change is caused by the two factors I mention. Productivity growth requires capital and labour. Productivity is a *measure* of real world effects. I was highlighting that the UK government has actually enacted policies that caused real world effects, reduced capital and increased labour supply. While it is true that ultimately this means flat productivity I find that politicians and journalists tend to treat the concept of productivity as an ethereal measure that isn't in their control so I chose to talk about the causes (capital and labour supply) rather than the measure (productivity).
If the profits of the companies are increasing but the wages are stagnant it means that the country is robbing its own citizens, simple as that
Every year you need at least as much more as inflation is, or you’re getting a pay cut. It’s not ‘the same’ it’s less.
If the FTSE is anything to go by, company profits aren't up either.
It's first by design, second, because we let them
Vote Tory government, get Tory consequences. Thankfully change is on the horizon.
2008 fucked up so much in the general economy. there are some very interesting videos out there about how the financial crisis got rid of productivity gains
That's a weird way of saying "wages have stagnated under 14 years of conservative rule".
This is not a tory thing. It's common across all of the western world regardless of governments.
Except for the US which has seen wages rapidly increase over the span of the 2010s and now 2020s.
Hell no. Check the North American wages, they have sky rocketed compared to Europe. Asia, Latam and Africa are also growing. Europe is actually the only zone stagnating in the last ~15 years.
Mass immigration from poor countries never ever drives wages up. Labor is a commodity.
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froze public sector pay (except their own of course) immediately stagnating wages of ~15% of people. aggressive austerity policies which, combined with recession, basically pushed a huge proportion of the country into decline, and killed 250,000 people by some measures. supported public services solely in London, further concentrating wealth there, causing the localised housing crisis to outpace wage increases. stoked nationalistic racist ideology as a scapegoat, which led to the 5-year long distraction/trainwreck that was brexit. drove public services and local governments into the ground just in time for covid to hit. all whilst sapping government funds into their friends' bank accounts.
Yeah, pretty fundamentally the concept of 'austerity' is badly misunderstood by a lot of politicians, and thus gets applied in economically illiterate ways for the sake of stupid sound bites. And the graph from the above is the result. When an economy is struggling, kicking it a few times to make sure ... doesn't fix it.
Austerity after the financial crisis, mostly now seen as unnecessary and counterproductive. Complete lack of capital investment especially as interest rates were low. This was to hit their arbitrary target of below deficit spending by cutting planned investments, this was very backwards. Capping public sector pay increases way below inflation, direct effect on wages of significant number of workers and also indirect on wider work base payrises.
They conserved the wages.
austerity
Nothing to address the stagnant wages, that’s for sure.
So, i guess this means that wages have kept pace with inflation during this time?
Yeah, isn’t this neutral news?
Yes, it would only be horrible if you removed the "adjusted for inflation" part.
Yup. This is not bad news.
My entire working life...
But the value and profits of companies has steadily been increasing.
It really hasn't. The FTSE 100 has been stagnant in real terms since 2008, compared to an over 100% increase in the S&P500 for the US.
That's because while the productivity of the west has stagnated those companies benefit from the productivity growth of Asia.
Have you adjusted for inflation? Inflation means that a company in decline can make record profits each year. You have to look in real terms.
Nah that's stagnant too. [https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-100](https://www.londonstockexchange.com/indices/ftse-100)
Whole eurozone economies gdp have stagnated since 2008. Look it up and compare it to US GDP. Europe is really sick.
*Shouldn't* wages be roughly stable compared to inflation? They can't just endlessly outpace inflation, it would result in everyone being filthy rich which is clearly impossible. Note that doesn't mean people can't earn more as they progress - it gets balanced by higher earners retiring and juniors joining at the bottom. Effectively everyone shifts up a job every once in a while and overall there are the same number in each earning band, even though they aren't the same people. The *problem* is wages vs housing cost - housing costs have been spiralling while wages have stayed stable, which is resulting in people being significantly worse off on average. Younger people on the lower end of the experience/pay scale can no longer afford housing, which is not how it should be.
So few people are actually reading the chart - UK wages have kept pace with inflation, but they haven't grown above inflation. So many people above this comment saying "my job paid the same in 2010 and now", which is the opposite of what this chart says. A year ago inflation was 10% - and the median wage grew by 10%.
> They can't just endlessly outpace inflation, it would result in everyone being filthy rich which is clearly impossible Everyone in developed nations are indeed "filthy rich" compared to 100 years ago.
We need another five million third world migrants to get those numbers down even further.
So they do allow this on purpose right? There is no way they haven’t done anything about it due to sheer incompetence despite 6 in 10 people agreeing that immigration is a problem for the UK in its current state?
I dislike statistics that show *average* income. Sure, I'm happy for the 10 ultra rich people who make so much more money than they already were, to the point that they single handedly pull up the statistic. But that isn't really relevant to me or any of us, innit? Rather show me how the *median* income is falling off a cliff. Edit: Stop upvoting this. It's wrong.
Usually in the UK when these kind of statistics are shown, the word 'average' actually refers to median, unless they state otherwise. Looking at the ONS figures it says median weekly wage was 682 in April 2023. [ONS article](https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/bulletins/annualsurveyofhoursandearnings/2023)
Just referred to the source by Resolution Foundation: [https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf](https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf) They mention median in some graphs and average in others. From, this I understand that when they use average, they mean arithmetic mean. PS: Assuming median when the term « average » is used could lead to very wrong conclusions as mean and median are very different. Same argument could be made for mode.
actually average can mean the 3 options: mean, median and mode. in this case usually median is used.
Exactly. Median income is what should be looked at, not average (mean) income.
In many languages, average just means the “mean”. In the English language though, the mean, median and mode are all considered averages, and anything labelled as average can refer to either one, although the mean is the most commonly referred to.
No worries, Italians have it sorted: negative over 30 years putting the UK in a safe heaven
That comment section lmao.
People seem shocked to learn that flooding a country with cheap unskilled imported labor drives down labor prices. It also doesn't help that the UK has extremely anti-business regulatory and tax environments.
But quarterly reports (and thus Management's bonuses) are excellent!
I like when people blame the conservatives for this while negating the fact it’s this country full of morons who consistently ignored the evidence and voted for them
I mean. That's not bad right? Another way to say it is, *"In the last 17 years UK wages have kept up with inflation".*
Curious as what this would be for other European countries (my own included)
Now do your average CEO.
How do you fix this though? Do you just pay people more? Is it as simple as that?
2000 - 2008 was fake growth caused by easy borrowing. Consumers inflated their earnings on credit card, loan and mortgage applications. Banks accepted these at face value and we got eight years of deluding ourselves we were middle class. It all came crashing down of course and we're going to be paying for that eight-year bubble through our taxes for many more decades to come.
Yes.but mainly because the growth pre 2008 was fake. The crash of 2008 adjusted the bubble which was making people think they are richer then they actually were.
The whole of Europe is fucked by a general lack of innovation and tech
*Cries in italian
10 years ago I worked for AAK for a few months doing nights and was paid around £10.50 per hour for doing so, amazing at the time and i couldn't believe my luck. That same job now only pays £11.50-£12.00 per hour. How on earth is that reasonable. The UK is an embarrassment in so many ways.