In days of yore, workers used to say: another day, another dollar. These days they’d be more inclined to say: another quarter, another sign that wages are stuck in the slow lane. But why is wage growth so weak? This week we got some clues from the Productivity Commission.
We also learnt from the Australian Bureau of Statistics that, as measured by the wage price index, wages rose by 0.5 per cent in the three months to the end of December, and by just 2.2 per cent over the year - pretty much the same rate as for the past two years.
It compares with the rise in consumer prices over the year of just 1.8 per cent. If prices aren’t rising by much, it’s hardly surprising that wages aren’t either. But we got used to wages growing by a percentage point or so per year faster than consumer prices and, as you see, last year they grew only 0.4 percentage points faster.
It’s this weak “real” wage growth that’s puzzling and worrying economists and p---ing off workers. Real wages have been weak for six or seven years.
So why has real wage growth been so much slower than we were used to until 2012-13? Various people, with various axes to grind, have offered rival explanations – none of which they’ve been able to prove.
One argument is that real wage growth is weak for the simple and obvious reason that the annual improvement in the productivity of labour (output of goods and services per hour worked) has also been weak.
It’s true that labour productivity has been improving at a much slower annual rate in recent years. It’s true, too, that there’s long been a strong medium-term correlation between the rate of real wage growth and the rate of labour productivity improvement.
When the two grow at pretty much the same rate, workers gain their share of the benefits from their greater productivity, and do so without causing higher inflation. But this hasn’t seemed adequate to fully explain the problem.
Another explanation the Reserve Bank has fallen back on as its forecasts of stronger wage growth have failed to come to pass is that there’s a lot of spare capacity in the labour market (high unemployment and underemployment) which has allowed employers to hire all the workers they’ve needed without having to bid up wages. Obviously true, but never been a problem at other times of less-than-full employment.
For their part, the unions are in no doubt why wage growth has been weak: the labour market "reforms" of the Howard government have weakened the workers’ ability to bargain for decent pay rises, including by reducing access to enterprise bargaining.
But this week the Productivity Commission included in its regular update on our productivity performance a purely numerical analysis of the reasons real wage growth has been weak since 2012-13. It compared the strong growth in real wages in the economy’s “market sector” (16 of the economy’s 19 industries, excluding public administration, education and training, and health care and social assistance) during the 18 years to 2012-13 with the weak growth over the following six years.
The study found that about half the slowdown in real wage growth could be explained by the slower rate of improvement in labour productivity. Turns out the weaker productivity performance was fully explained by just three industries: manufacturing (half), agriculture and utilities (about a quarter each).
A further quarter of the slowdown in real wage growth is explained by the effects and after-effects of the resources boom. Although the economists’ conventional wisdom says real wages should grow in line with the productivity of labour, this implicitly assumes the country’s “terms of trade” (the prices we get for our exports relative to the prices we pay for our imports) are unchanged.
But, being a major exporter of rural and mineral commodities, that assumption often doesn’t hold for Australia. The resources boom that ran for a decade from about 2003 saw a huge increase in the prices we got for our exports of coal and iron ore. This, in turn, pushed the value of our dollar up to a peak of about $US1.10, which made our imports of goods and services (including overseas holidays) much cheaper.
This, of course, was reflected in the consumer price index. When you use these “consumer prices” to measure the growth in workers’ real wages before 2012-13, you find they grew by a lot more than justified by the improvement in productivity.
In the period after 2012-13, however, export prices fell back a fair way and so did the dollar, making imported goods and services harder for consumers to afford. So there’s been a sort of correction in which real wages have grown by less than the improvement in labour productivity would have suggested they should. Some good news: this is a one-time correction that shouldn’t continue.
Finally, the study finds that a further fifth of the slowdown in real wage growth is explained by an increase in the profits share of national income and thus an equivalent decline in the wages share.
Almost three-quarters of the increase in the profits share is also explained by the resources boom. It involved a massive injection of financial capital (mainly by big foreign mining companies, such as BHP) to hugely increase the size of our mining industry – which, as the central Queenslanders lusting after Adani will one day find out, uses a lot of big machines and very few workers. Naturally, the suppliers of that capital expect a return on their investment.
But harder to explain and defend is the study’s finding that more than a quarter of the increase in the profits share is accounted for by the greater profitability of the finance and insurance sector. Think greedy bankers, but also the ever-growing pile of compulsory superannuation money and the anonymous army of financial-types who find ways to take an annual bite out of your savings.
