Commenting on the take-home pay figures released today
(Friday) by the Treasury, TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady (pictured, above) said:
“Today’s claims on take-home pay show just how much union
campaigning is shaping the political agenda.
“But they need taking with several tons of salt. They do
not include the effects of tax credits and benefits. Freezing child benefit has
hit families hard.
“The figures use the lowest possible measure of inflation
(CPI), which excludes housing costs, and is not the one that the government
uses to index rail fares (RPI) and other important contributors to living
costs.
“The analysis also uses the most generous possible measure
for wages, and not the one that the government uses (average weekly earnings)
when measuring incomes.
“The Institute for Fiscal Studies is confident that living
standards will still be lower at the time of the next election than they were
before the crash and at the last election. That is the inevitable result of
austerity economics that has delayed the return of growth and produced an
unbalanced recovery based on household borrowing and rising house prices.
According to a TUC poll conducted just before Christmas
only one in fifty voters (two per cent) say they are benefiting from the
recovery. More than half (58 per cent) ‘expect the gains of an economic
recovery to go mainly to the types of people and parts of the country who are
already doing well’ www.tuc.org.uk/economic-issues/voters-say-recovery-will-pass-them-2014
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