UK workers '£11k worse off since 2008' due to stagnant wage growth

British workers are £11,000 worse off a year after 15 years of “unprecedented” wage stagnation and economic policy failure, the Resolution Foundation think tank said on Monday.

The foundation’s study compared wage inflation before the banking industry sparked the 2008 financial crash and subsequent trends to find the average worker was falling well behind inflation and other comparable economies such as Germany.

It said the gap had widened to £4,000 a year now from more than £500 a year in 2008.

Had wages continued to grow as they were before the financial crash of 2008, the average worker would make £11,000 more per year than they do now, taking rising prices into account, the foundation added.

“Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this. This is definitely not what normal looks like. This is what failure looks like,” the foundation’s chief executive Torsten Bell told the BBC.

The broadcaster which is reporting the findings through its Panorama current affairs programme, quoted Bell as calling the economic situation “almost completely unprecedented”.

Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com