Wage Deflation Comes To Britain
Times Online: The new worker's dilemma: take a pay cut or risk getting the sack
Struggling businesses are making plans to cut workers’ pay as Britain slides into its deepest recession since the Second World War.
Unemployment is now rising at a faster rate than in the early phases of the Nineties recession, official figures out yesterday confirmed...
Scattered examples of businesses seeking to cut or renegotiate pay for existing staff have already emerged as the downturn has gathered pace, but the disclosure yesterday from the Bank’s agents around the country suggests that the trend is gathering pace.
Among the harshest examples of new terms for existing staff came in December at the Herald and Times newspaper group in Glasgow, which made all its journalists redundant and asked them to reapply for their jobs on less generous terms in a forced restructuring.
JCB, the construction equipment group, asked its workers in November to accept a £50-a-week pay cut.
This month unions protested that Honda, the Japanese carmaker, planned a 50 per cent reduction in wages for 4,200 workers at its Swindon plant, which is now set to halt production for a fourth month until May...