How the changing shape of the UK workforce has started to drag down wages

By Laura Gardiner. It’s clichéd to say that the most certainty you can take from any economist’s prediction is that it will be mistaken, but many got their forecasts for 2014 horribly wrong. At the beginning of this year, commentators were fairly united in hailing the ‘year of the pay rise’, with most expecting the UK’s enduring real wage squeeze to finally turn the corner, and some predicting that pay would bounce back quite rapidly over the course of the year. Two thirds of the way through 2014 this has not come to pass and the outlook has been repeatedly downgraded. For example the Bank of England now doesn’t expect a return to real wage growth until the middle of next year. Looking back, many of us are left wondering why we were all far too optimistic. Read more...