Workers win war on low wages in EU’s most stable economy

Bloomberg

Czech workers are slowly winning the war on low wages. Faced with the European Union’s lowest unemployment rate, companies are tackling a dearth of able bodies in the country of 10.6 million with bonuses and higher salaries. According to Josef Stredula, the head of the nation’s umbrella union, that will continue for several more years as labor costs lie far below those in the richer West.
“In the medium term, certainly in the next three or four years, we can realistically expect real wage growth of 3 percent to 5 percent per year,” Stredula said in an interview
in Prague.
After years of subdued salary increases, the ex-communist country saw average paychecks rise a nominal 8 percent in the last quarter of 2017 to 31,646 koruna ($1,430) from a year earlier and 5.3 percent when adjusted for inflation. The surge will affect everything from living standards, in which the Czechs have surpassed older EU members Greece and Portugal and are closing in on Spain, to monetary policy.
A shortage of drivers forced the capital city of Prague to scale back public-transport service in the first two weeks of this year, while Brno, the country’s second-largest city, offered new bus and tram operators a signing bonus worth more than three monthly salaries in March. Skoda Auto AS, a unit of Volkswagen AG and the biggest Czech manufacturer and exporter, last month agreed to increase salaries, including bonuses and overtime, by more than 20 percent.
The central bank, which kick-started interest-rate increases in Europe last year, has repeatedly said an overheating jobs market will warrant additional monetary tightening to keep inflation in check. While price growth is running below the 2 percent target, higher salaries will eventually force companies to pass extra costs to customers, the bank’s chief economist, Tomas Holub, said a month ago.
Investors have increased bets this month on a further increase in Czech borrowing costs, with forward-rate agreements now pricing in a quarter-point hike in the key rate to 1 percent in the fourth quarter.
The overheating labor market is similar to Romania’s, where an annual increase of 15.5 percent in average wages helped prompt policy makers to raise the cost of borrowing three times since January. In Poland, wages grew almost 8 percent from a year earlier in April. While Czech productivity is lower than Germany’s, there’s plenty of room to push Czech paychecks higher, according to Stredula.
“This shouldn’t cause any imbalance because the gap between productivity and wages is still relatively large,” he said.