My boss went around handing out the annual pay review letters today. Unless you get a promotion, the company's policy for the past decade or so has been to only give out a 'rise' equivalent to the CPI ('consumer price index' aka inflation rate), which this time around was 2.25%. A plot of my salary vs. the actual CPI figures published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows that the company has 'rounded down' the adjustment on several occasions, resulting in my pay actually dropping about 3% in real terms over the past decade or so. But this time the CPI adjustment was slightly higher than the official inflation rate for the past year.
If I was feeling adventurous I'd show my boss the plot of my salary vs. the Average Weekly Ordinary Time Earnings (AWOTE), which shows my salary package has dropped about 10% compared to average wages since my last promotion. However, since I don't want to have to try looking for a new job now that I'm in my 50s if I can possible avoid it, I'm relatively happy for my pay to only keep up with the cost of living. I was even pleasantly surprised that the company didn't try to offset the 0.25% legislated increase in the Superannuation Guarantee Levy (to 9.25%) with a reduction in the quanta of CPI increment.
Since I haven't had an 'annual' performance review for several years, my boss also took the opportunity to spend a couple of minutes saying what a great job I was doing - so at least it doesn't look like I'm about to get sacked.
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