Wired-GOV Newswire (news from other organisations)
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CIPD - Employment growth drives employment rate to record high while pay growth remains relatively sluggish for the majority of workers
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Gerwyn Davies, Labour Market Adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the professional body for HR and people development, comments on the official labour market statistics published yesterday by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) |
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“Employers’ appetite for taking on workers shows no sign of abating. This is reflected by the record number of people aged 16-64 in work. Apart from the modest increase in redundancies, all of the employment indicators are moving in the same positive direction. It’s good to see that more people are getting into work but the focus must now shift to what is happening to those people once they are in work. Skills shortages and utilisation is still a major problem in many businesses. If we are to improve overall UK productivity, we must lift up the bonnet on British businesses and take a look at what they are doing to develop and use their people’s skills. Until this issue is tackled, performance and pay will continue to suffer.” |
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“This is reflected in the fact that pay growth remains static for the majority of workers. Earnings including bonuses may have risen, but this is largely due to the bonuses being more prevalent in sectors such as finance. Meanwhile, the basic pay measure has fallen modestly compared with last month. |
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As our own Labour Market Outlook indicated earlier this week, a tale of two workforces is emerging. Some employees are comfortably exceeding the cost of living in their pay packets and others aren’t getting a pay rise at all. It’s no surprise to see pay growth remain so stubborn given current productivity levels and the increased supply of workers, especially older workers and EU migrants. As the figures show this morning, economic migrants make up around forty per cent of employment growth during the past year, driven by an increase of around 25% EU8* migrants in employment”. |
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Note - * EU8 refers to the 2004 accession countries – who joined the EU in 2004 (Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia |
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An overview of the latest CIPD labour Market Outlook is available here and the full report is available here |
