Britain has joined Portugal and Greece as the only three countries in the OECD where real wages fell between 2007 and 2015.
For the UK and Greece both the decline was 10.4%, according to a study by the TUC which was published on Wednesday, leaving both countries as equal bottom of the wage growth league table for the 29 members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
During the same period, the analysis showed that real wages grew in Poland by 23%, in Germany by 14%, and in France by 11%. The OECD average was an increase of 6.7%.
Real wages are income from work which has been adjusted for inflation.
“Wages fell off the cliff after the financial crisis, and have barely begun to recover,” said Frances O’Grady, leader of the TUC – a federation of trades unions in England and Wales.
“People cannot afford another hit to their pay packets. Working people must not foot the bill for a Brexit downturn in the way they did for the bankers’ crash.”
The Treasury, however, said that “living standards have reached their highest level and wages continue to rise faster than prices”.
It added that the “UK employment rate has grown more than any G7 country” and is above the 2008 level before the nation was plunged into recession, the deepest and longest since post-WWII.
TUC analysis found that Germany, Hungary and Poland had also increased employment but raised real wages at the same time.
According to the OECD’s annual employment report, real hourly wages in the UK were down by more than 25% from where they would have been if growth had carried on at the rate taking place from 2000 to 2007.
“The majority of UK households have faced a lost decade of income,” the Bank of England’s chief economist Andy Haldane said last month. Half of UK households have seen no material recovery in real disposable incomes since around 2005, he noted.
