PAY DATA
Pay rises highest for three years - IRS
The new-year wage round has witnessed a marked increase in the level of pay awards, according to pay specialists XpertHR in its first settlement analysis of 2012.
Pay rises effective in January 2012 – exclusively in the private sector due to a lack of public sector bargaining at this time of year – are worth a median 2.8%. This is the highest level seen since December 2008 when the XpertHR headline measure of private sector pay deals stood at 3.7%.
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Almost half (48.8%) of January 2012 pay deals are worth 3% or more, and 3% is the most common pay increase recorded.
This is well above the 2% to 2.5% median increase recorded through 2011 in the private sector, and up from 2.5% in the three months to the end of December 2011.
Manufacturing pay awards continue to outstrip those in the services sector, something that we have seen since April 2010.
Among the pay awards effective in January 2012, the median pay increase in the manufacturing sector is 3%, compared with 2.5% in private sector services.
A final word
"Over the past few months we have started to see evidence of a shift to higher pay awards than were made the year before. We now find that the majority of pay awards are at a higher or the same level as paid to the same group of employees the year before, with only a handful making lower awards." - Sheila Attwood XpertHR Pay and Benefits editor.
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Title: “Pay review update”, IRS Employment Review, 20 January 2012.
Survey details: The research is based on the details of 41 pay awards settled in January 2012.
XpertHR, formerly known an Industrial Relations Services (IRS), is the “UK's most comprehensive online source of legal compliance, good practice and benchmarking information made available to HR professionals as a single subscription service”.
XpertHR offers detailed statistics and analysis of recent pay settlements across the UK. XpertHR collects details of pay settlements for around 1,500 employee groups each year. Its database contains more than 28,000 settlements. For more information visit www.xperthr.co.uk.