New collective agreements are showing no sign of the acceleration in wages growth that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) fears.
Admittedly, statistics on enterprise bargaining deals are fairly slow coming.
The latest numbers, taking us up to the end of March, were only released by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations on Monday.
But wage agreements are locked in for an average of around three years, giving wage inflation some inertia – it takes a while to slow down when the labour market weakens, but also takes a while to speed up when there are plenty of jobs around.
So anyone worried that the economic outlook might be clouded by accelerating wage inflation – and that includes the inflation-focused RBA – should be comforted by figures showing wage rises under deals struck in the March quarter were equivalent to four per cent a year.
That was up a bit from the 3.8 per cent pace of the December quarter, but that was in turn the second slowest quarter since early 2003 – hardly a revealing comparison.
Drawing back a bit, there is no sign that the trend is rising, even though unemployment during the quarter hovered around five per cent, very low by the standards of recent experience.
A year ago, collective agreements were producing wage rises averaging 4.1 per cent and the year before that the figure was 4.7 per cent.
It was a similar picture for the private sector, where wage rises in the March quarter averaged 3.8 per cent for the second quarter in a row, the same as a year earlier but down from 4.8 per cent a year before that.
Perhaps just as important for the inflation-wary, in each case the new wage rises were in line with or slower than the wage rises embodied in agreements already in place at the end of 2010.
More timely figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) show average wage rates, excluding bonuses, rose by 3.8 per cent over the year to June.
That was up from 3.1 per cent a year earlier when the pause in minimum wage rises prompted by the global financial crisis was suppressing wage inflation.
Even so, it was actually a touch lower than annual increases recorded in the previous two quarters, and well under the annual rises of more than four per cent that had been typical in the few years ahead of the crisis.
The forces that gave rise to the rates of wage inflation evident in both those data sets have since weakened.
In particular, employment growth has virtually stalled and is going backwards in the key full-time category.
Most measures of job vacancies are showing some sign of slackening, with the upward trend in total hours worked one of the exceptions.
So it looks as though it will be a year or so at least before wages growth is likely to push up toward the 4.5 per cent-plus rate thought to form the RBA’s line in the sand.
For workers trying to coax a wage rise out of their boss, that may not be such an appealing thought.
But, given the RBA’s fear of inflation and the fact that its only anti-inflation weapon is higher interest rates, it’s a cloud whose lining has a nice silver lustre.
