Salary erosion

[QueryA]

recieved an email from HR today that said our inflationary pay rise would be 2.5%. I looked back and my starting post doc salary in 2008 was 28k. This was the bottom of the post doc grade then. If we had 3% inflation pay rise each year in 2024 it would be worth 45k. However starting post doc salary is about 38k. A discrepancy of 7k.

it’s just depressing. My salary has obviously increased as I’ve moved up a grade and also up the points within that scale. However it’s not keeping up with inflation. I haven’t calculated what I should be on currently if I was on my grade/point if it had kept up with inflation. I don’t hi k I could face it.

The gap between the lower grades and higher grades are getting smaller. I see peers in other professions earning more. The answer doesn’t seem to be striking, no one cares. Just having a moan I suppose but it certainly doesn’t make me feel valued. Particularly as the workload is going up and up 🙁

it just feels like the final straw

It absolutely sucks, OP.

The compensation used to be a high level of employment security combined with a good amount of discretion in how to perform the job. Both of these features have been substantially eroded together with salaries.

As we are truly an island unto ourselves now, with the REF and nationwide grant competitions providing most of the research rankings, it is easy for the government of the day to big us up in the absence of international comparisons. (Emphatically, we do excel in some areas) My fear is that with research conditions being so much better in Europe and North America, we will have another brain drain.

Because there are so many more PG students and postdocs than permanent positions, this can be disguised. Some new blood is a great thing, but not at the expense of the best of a generation.

All deeply depressing

Agree.

My finishing PhD student just told me about an (admittedly industry) postdoc in another country she has gotten to final interview stages for, that pays more than I'm getting with nearly 2 decades experience as faculty. (I didn't tell her that - but I agreed with her it was a great salary :) )

I do US taxes every year, and my exchange rate-transferred salary is STILL significantly less than starting salaries I was offered in the US. Now some of this is the exchange rate - it was nearly 1:2 when I started and is now more like 1:3/4, but still, it galls a bit.

I also have done some joint grants with US colleagues and goggle at the salaries... and feel slightly embarrassed they can see mine.

Agree - it’s depressing and frustrating. More work, more admin and less and less relative pay. When accounting for inflation since starting as a lecturer in 2008 my pay has hardly increased despite moving up the payscale. Meanwhile OHs has doubled in the same time, even when accounting for inflation. Morale is at all all time low - am thinking about leaving (but institutionalised and not sure what I could do!)

Another eye opening thread this morning in AIBU about whether its realistic for a graduate to earn 55k at 24. Loads of people saying yes. Makes me want to weep, I barely earn that at 50. I seriously need to think about moving profession, but like @Breakuporbreakdown I'm institutionalised

My place is withholding the 2.5% award and reviewing its affordability in November and if they think it's still unaffordable we wait for an unspecified time. No backdating.

We are meant to be grateful for this because we haven't got any planned redundancies. For now .

Oh yes, it definitely feels like we are working harder and harder for less and less reward. I agree that 2.5% is an insult when we never got back anything like what we lost the year that inflation was 11%.

The only consolation to make it slightly less depressing is to change the comparison. Sure, it feels terrible if you compare what you earn to UK academics' salaries of the past, or academic salaries in the US (well, tenured professors not adjuncts), or the richest people you were at university with. But if you compare it to most people in your local community, someone at the top of the senior lecturer scale is still (albeit less than in the past) relatively well off in the majority of UK regions, as £55K is in the top 20% of earners. As academics we're far from alone in the problem of wages stagnating as we get older. The average UK wage for someone in their 50s is only £38K - very similar to the average for someone in their 30s. That 24 year old earning £55K is very unusual, earning nearly twice what most people their age do. There are plenty of highly skilled people in positions that pay a lot less than £55K. Even that £38K postdoc is already earning as much as an experienced FE lecturer, or the manager of a children's home.

The problem is it doesn't feel like that because we still think of academia as being some kind of elite profession - perhaps because some of us are old enough to remember when it kind of was. And we still think of Britain as a rich country, whereas it has got seriously poorer in the past decade and a half. Our experience is quite typical, as most of our fellow citizens are also earning less in real terms than they were in 2008. Happy days!