UK workers £11k worse off after years of wage stagnation – thinktank

theguardian.com:

Workers in the UK are £11,000 worse off a year after 15 years of “almost completely unprecedented” wage stagnation that signals a failure of recent economic policy, according to the Resolution Foundation.

The thinktank, which focuses on low-to-middle income households, compared wage inflation before the 2008 financial crash with the pace set since and found that the average worker was losing out by thousands of pounds a year.

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 is more like £4,000.

“Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this. This is definitely not what normal looks like. This is what failure looks like,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, told the BBC.

The broadcaster, which first reported on the analysis, quoted Bell as calling the economic situation “almost completely unprecedented”.

A Labour government presided over the 2008 crash and the immediate recovery efforts. But much of the wage stagnation to which Bell referred has come under the Conservative-led governments sitting since the 2010 general election.

Several major factors – and the Tories’ response to them – have influenced the UK’s economic performance since. Not least among those are Brexit, the Covid pandemic and the Ukraine war.

Last month, the work and pensions secretary, Mel Stride, acknowledged that Brexit had delivered a blow to investment decisions in the UK. He told the BBC: “I think if you have a situation where you create frictions between yourself and your major trading partners, I think you have to accept that that will have an