Crisis or no crisis, salary growth will lag because….

Here’s an interesting article about how the salary (wage) growth in the U.S is still lagging behind the economic growth (despite full employment). It’s in business-standard.com Basically, what it says is that wage growth should be on par already with the economic growth which has now enabled full employment. More jobs meant people could choose, it meant employers must pay more to get workers and this should of course push the salaries up, true? I think if the same standards are applied to most other countries, the salary growth is definitely growing more slowly. It is not for all positions though because for many top managements, their pay is getting very high. Here’s an earlier article: When salary packages for CEOs become way too high If they are paid extremely high, of course there would be lesser for everybody else. Let’s hope these CEOs are more generous and strive to give more to their employees too.
Anyway, the reason why salary growth would always lag moving forward is because only the best gets paid ever higher. Talents, especially those in scarcity will drive up the demand for them and their salaries too. However, for those who are doing the exact same thing, day in and day out, these would not get paid ever higher year after year because sooner or later, they would be replaced by people from other countries; cheaper costs. Do google about how robots would replace many more humans before we could find ever more things that we humans could do and robots could not do. There are already robots capable of performing surgeries, robots capable of writing simple programmes and even robots capable of answering complex questions which today is handled by humans! Yes, occasionally I also feel worried when I feel that I am repeating what I do every few months. I think that’s why I have only changed my job three times but I have changed my actual role and responsibility nothing less than 10 times!  I may be changing for the 11th or 12th time soon. Nope, many of those roles did not come with higher pay but new learnings and new growth.
Are we working in an industry which is still growing? If yes, it’s a great time to keep learning new things, enhancing our knowledge about new developments and even suggesting improvements. If we are working in an industry which is no longer growing, are we still able to add-value every year to what we do? When we work with our counterparts from other countries, are we teaching them or are they teaching us. If we are teaching them, are they lower pay or higher pay than us? If higher pay, they are in trouble. If lower pay, we are in trouble. If the other counterparts are teaching us and they are higher pay than us, they are in trouble but if they are teaching us and we are higher pay, it’s time to change job. Unfortunately, the world is getting smaller. Businesses can be set up anywhere in the world to do business with companies everywhere in the world. Only the most competitive will keep growing while the less competitive ones would slowly disappear. Oh yeah, if we earn good money today and we are investing it, the path towards retirement looks bright. If we are spending most of what we have, the future looks bleak because there’s no guarantee that we will keep earning good money…. I intend to work until I retire, not looking to become an entrepreneur but can always have an entrepreneur mindset as a working professional. Happy working, just like me.
written on 9 July 2017
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