Employee Rewards and Benefits News
Bosses feeling less business stress - but won't splash out on more pay
Bosses may feel better about business – but the message is don’t expect them to put their hands in their pocket and dish out more pay.
Salaries across the Asia Pacific region are still spiralling downward – although the slide is slowing from 4% in the first quarter of 2009 to 3.5% in the last quarter.
Currently, employers have a weather eye on seeing out the financial downturn rather than issues like employee pay and benefits. This especially applies when the plenty of well-qualified jobseekers are on the market while too few jobs are out there to go around.
Few organisations are looking to increase over the next 12 months while they contain costs to try and minimise economic harm to the bottom line.
Some companies – in Australia, for instance – are still looking to contain business costs by planning to cut more jobs by the end of the year.
High demand for specialist skills is keeping pay up in some sectors, allowing staff to seek an above average salary:
Engineering is almost 7% above the median, followed by construction at 5%, marketing at 4% with scientific and technical skills just below 4%.
Supply and distribution is the worst performing sector at 2.8% below the median. Other sectors offering a disappointing below median return include sales, customer service, clerical and IT.
The problem is the downturn has hit different countries harder than others. While Australia and New Zealand are suffering the highest unemployment for years, Malaysia, Singapore and China are starved of workers.
China suffered by ordering migrant workers to stay in their villages rather than move to industrial areas, causing a slip in recovery, as employees were not available to take up extra demand for supply from factories.
China has also suffered a wave of industrial unrest following the introduction of labour laws that has disrupted output in some areas.
Measures put in place by the Singapore government working with bosses and unions seem to be pulling the nation out of the downturn by looking closely at training and improving employer-employee relationships and the work-life balance.
Certainly, a year after the Lehman Brothers collapse that ignited the banking sector to implode and led to the global recession has seen some interesting shifts in the balance of economic power between the East and West.
China has emerged as the world’s powerhouse economy – but has shown a weakness that factory output alone is not enough to make a successful financial base for a nation because someone has to buy the goods and that means economies in the West have to function as well.
