/s

It might be easier to visualise if you substitute money in for something more tangible. Let's use water as an example; you might earn a one litre bottle of water for every hour you work. Your company then announces a pay rise accross the board; everyone in the company will now get twice as amny bottles! Sounds great, everyone's on board, the company gets huge amounts of positive PR. You're excited when it comes to pay day, just think what you'll do with all that extra water! But when you get your pay you're sorely dissapointed; while you did get twice as many bottles of water, each bottle is half the size. You may have got twice as many bottles but you got the exact same amount of water.

In this analogy bottles are currency, water is value. Twice as many bottles is meaningless if they're half the size. You got a 0% raise.

My problem here isn't about real terms (which you might notice I didn't even say). It's about the fact that in a cost of living crisis this article even exists. It's incredibly tone deaf and feels very much like a "ooh look at the shiny" slight of hand. "Things can't be that bad, look wages are growing!" Does that sound like an accurate assessment of the economic situation here right now?

Yes, wages have grown - that's great but it's not particularly relevant when a lot of people are reliant on food banks to eat. Including those who have had an 8% pay rise.

Having more money is great, but only when you can actually get more with it.

You know. I'm Swiss, so a lot of this inflation is very evident to me.

In 2022, 1 CHF was around 0.8GBP. Now, in 2023, 1 CHF is around 0.9GBP.

Guess what, that 8% pay rise was lower than inflation. 8% on top of 0.8 is only 0.864.

Without any more pay in Switzerland, I got an effective raise higher than these 'great' 8% in GB