• By Rob England
• BBC Information Journalism Group

35 minutes ago

Wages have failed to preserve up with the increasing price of living for several UK workers, prompting a wave of strikes in current months.

Figures recommend the image is substantially worse in some professions than other folks, with teachers and nurses seeing extra spend lost to inflation than workers in other sectors.

BBC News analysed salary figures from the Workplace for National Statistics (ONS) for the final ten years to see how wages in distinct professions examine to the general typical, and to uncover out how far spend for train drivers, paramedics, civil servants and other folks, has kept up with rates.

What is the typical employee paid?

More than the final decade, the wage of an typical complete-time employee in the UK has risen by about a quarter, to £33,000 in April 2022. That is nearly in line with increasing rates, falling just £230 quick of matching inflation.

You can see typical spend in a variety of sectors working with this interactive chart.

Teachers

Image supply, Getty Pictures

The typical salary for secondary college teachers has fallen behind increasing rates by practically £4,500 more than the final ten years: a single of the biggest drops of the careers examined.

The typical secondary teacher earns extra than the typical general worker: just beneath £41,000 final April. But had this salary kept pace with increasing rates more than this period, this figure would be extra than £45,000.

The ONS does not create information for each sort of teacher. But the image for “teaching experts” general, which incorporates main schools and university teaching employees, appears incredibly comparable to what has occurred in secondary schools. They have an typical wage of about £41,000 but this is practically £5,000 behind the rise in rates given that 2012.

Junior physicians

Image caption,

Junior physicians are asking for a 35% spend rise

The salaries of each junior and senior physicians are combined in the ONS’s information, and so the BBC is not capable to analyse them in the exact same way as other careers.

Senior physicians are not striking and are in the major two% of earners in the UK.

Junior physicians earn properly above the typical salary in England, but the Nuffield Trust estimate that their spend has fallen behind inflation by practically £5,000 given that 2011.

This is a smaller sized fall than the headline figure applied by the junior doctors’ union, the BMA, but nonetheless bigger than several other groups of workers, primarily based on the ONS information.

Civil servants

Image supply, Getty Pictures

Image caption,

PCS union members on strike at Cardiff Airport

The wages of the most junior civil servants, or “national government administrative occupations” as the ONS calls them, have kept up with increasing rates, but they are not properly off.

These include things like individuals who could be operating as an advisor in a job centre or as an administrator in central government. The typical complete-time salary for this sort of job is about £27,700.

That is practically £1,300 extra than if the salary had just been improved by inflation more than the previous decade. But it is nonetheless properly beneath the national typical.

The Public and Industrial Solutions Union (PCS) say they’ve prioritised the wages of the least properly off when negotiating with bosses in the civil service.

On the subsequent rung up are mid-level “associate experts”. Their typical salary is about £2,400 above the national typical, but if it had kept pace with rates given that 2012, it would be practically £900 pounds greater nonetheless.

Who else is at present in negotiations?

There are other workers represented in the information who have been poised to take, or have taken, strike action more than the previous handful of months, such as physiotherapists, ambulance employees, nurses and rail workers. Some are at present in spend negotiations with their employers.

Broadly, the typical salary of a nurse is a handful of thousand pounds greater than the national typical, but their spend has not kept up with increasing rates.

For a complete-time paramedic, the typical salary is practically 50% greater than the typical worker’s salary and has grown by about £3,000 extra than rates in the final ten years. Unions say element of that development is due to NHS spend scales in 2016, exactly where paramedics had been moved up a band to reflect modifications in their jobs.

Meanwhile, ambulance drivers and emergency healthcare technicians have been a single of the hardest hit by inflation. They earned £27,500 as of 2022, which was practically £1,600 significantly less than if their spend had risen with inflation.

Although train drivers do properly, that is not accurate for all train workers. Rail travel assistants, a category which incorporates ticket inspectors and station attendants, saw a £300 drop in typical spend versus inflation in the most current figures.

Methodology

We applied gross spend for the typical complete time worker in each and every profession – working with the median typical – comparing development in that spend to inflation as measured by annual CPIH.

Nuffield Trust’s figures had been primarily based on figures for NHS England and applied a distinct measure of inflation named CPI that has grown slightly more rapidly than CPIH.

Exactly where job names or codes changed from a single year to the subsequent, we applied this lookup tool created by Warwick University to match jobs.

The coronavirus pandemic impacted the survey figures for 2020 and 2021 due to a variety of things, such as furlough. The ONS suggests treating these figures with higher caution.

The salary is the spend of the typical worker, rather than a precise measure of terms and situations, spend bands or beginning salaries. It incorporates overtime, bonuses or allowances for anti-social hours and covers workers in the public or private sector. Increases can be triggered by points other than raises. These include things like a shift in seniority (decrease-paid workers leaving the profession) or in operating hours (extra individuals performing overtime).

The development in typical spend is probably to underestimate spend development for an person worker who could get promoted and move from becoming beneath-typical to above-typical inside their profession.

In the chart at the major of the story we refer to “junior level” and “mid level” civil servants. The ASHE descriptions for these jobs are national government administrative occupations (junior) and public solutions associate experts (mid).

Further reporting by Becky Dale, Libby Rogers, Zoe Conway and Robert Cuffe