Wage Inflation vrs. HPI

vivatifosi

Cleaver wrote: »

I guess many people can't put a letter together, but I guess in our office I could count the number of letters sent each year on one hand. We don't tend to write out to 'customers' very often and when we do it's normally a mass-created letter that gets checked and messed around with a lot anyway. All tends to be e-mail nowadays.

I work B2B so I still need to be able to write letters and - more importantly - quotes and invoices. However in my library job (I worked today) I met a six-year-old who tried to re-program the library computer. Times they are indeed a changin'.

PasturesNew

Cleaver wrote: »

I can therefore imagine that if you had a specialist company that needed a load of documents, reports or transcripts creating from an audio file or handwritten documents you would need someone with all of those skills and that person could probably charge a hefty premium. I doubt you could get someone with those skills for £5 or £6 an hour. I certainly don't know many people with the ability to do what you've described above.

But in a modern office for a typical PA / secretary job you wouldn't need these skills, just the ability to type at a reasonable speed and with decent accuracy. As I said above, knowledge of all MS packages, the ability to multi-task, get on with colleagues, use initiative, pick up additional stuff and quickly run with it is probably now more valued.

My original posting was pointing out that [a] a lot of roles no longer exist a lot of roles have had 0 wage inflation for 10-20 years. This was because this thread was talking of wage inflation.

I think for most people it's not until they're laid off from their current job that they find out just how much the world has changed in the past 10-20 years.

I remember late in the 1990s, one large organisation where I worked had all its clerical and secretarial grades rebanded, they removed entirely the top two bands and then rebanded jobs down as far as they could. Previously a proper secretary on a Band 3 job could have got to the 7th level of a scale; afterwards the job became a Band 2 job and the top scale was on the 5th level.

The job I did in 1997 was IT-based, at £17k. As I said, I looked in 2007 to see how much that job pays now and it's still £17k.

kriss_boy

The reason I asked is because my girlfriend is a lucky beggar working in the NHS.

They are getting 2.25% in April.

olly300

PasturesNew wrote: »

There is very little PA work these days. In one agency I went into in 1997 they paid just 5p/hour extra for PAs. From what I read online, it seems that there are still PAs in London, but in temping type roles etc in the rest of the country there are few.

I wasn't working in London. I was actually paid about £2 extra for PA work.

I did keep getting emails from one of the agencies I used for a few years afterwards and the rates never increased.

PasturesNew wrote: »

I used to be a PA, obviously. One of the ways you could tell "you'd made it" was to be a PA with a particular type of electric typewriter. I got one of those in one job, it was an IBM Executive Typewriter. It was proportional spacing, so if you did make a mistake then to correct it you needed to use microspacing to replace the letters. The letter "i" took up 2 microspaces, e/c/d etc took up 3 microspaces and an "m" would take up 5. The one I had used a brown carbon ribbon and typed onto yellow paper ... very posh for what must have been about 1982/1984.

http://www.etypewriters.com/d-exec.jpg

My mum was a secretary so she told me about all the different things she did when I was a child. I actually learnt how to write letters from her.

She refused to allow me or my siblings learn to type particularly us girls as she didn't want us to ever do her job. I remember her taking her typing books away from my sister then me, when we were both about 13. She threw a fit when I stated I was having "typing" class at school. So we all learnt to touch type on the sly.

Funny thing is that every single one of my siblings and myself works with computers to some extent daily, though with only 2 of us it's our main job.

Cleaver

kriss_boy wrote: »

The reason I asked is because my girlfriend is a lucky beggar working in the NHS.

They are getting 2.25% in April.

Not quite sure why the NHS is getting this rise when most people are taking paycuts or at the very least not getting a payrise.

olly300

kriss_boy wrote: »

The reason I asked is because my girlfriend is a lucky beggar working in the NHS.

They are getting 2.25% in April.

That will probably be their last real rise for ages.

I remember discussing wages about 4 years ago and again about a year ago with 2 people I know who were trained social workers but didn't work as them. One never worked as one. The guy, who had worked as a social worker, pointed out that wages had increased while Labour had been in power but would fall back as soon as the Tories got in.

PasturesNew

I know somebody who is a solicitor, with a secretary. They've always had a secretary, even though that secretary is part of a typing pool too, she's "their secretary". This person is about to undertake a trial of some dictating software that will enable them to write their own letters ... so there'll be another secretary laid off (repeated right the way across the organisation) if that works out well. The secretary earns 1/4 of what this person earns, I wonder what the loss of productivity of this professional will be when the technology under performs... but that's rarely measured.

michaels

You could have just lied and claimed 70 wpm - is it too late for you to edit?

Cleaver wrote: »

I just timed myself - 69 wpm. You're right, 90 is fast.

But as discussed, I just don't know whether fast typing is a required skill in most general offices nowadays.

sabretoothtigger

olly300 wrote: »

That will probably be their last real rise for ages.

I remember discussing wages about 4 years ago and again about a year ago with 2 people I know who were trained social workers but didn't work as them. One never worked as one. The guy, who had worked as a social worker, pointed out that wages had increased while Labour had been in power but would fall back as soon as the Tories got in.

Either way in future I think it'll have to be pay cuts in general.

This thread is about PPI or purchasing power I think and some very good points made, basically its about supply and demand.

The influence of computers has had negatives in many job pay packages I think, in theory the economy and so people of britain should have benefited (in general) though that is harder to see I guess. Most people would accept that the uk has gotten richer since the early eighties

surely wage inflation will rise quicker than house prices? What Im getting as is the affordablitliy of homes, do you reckon in 10 years time the average house price could or should be, say, 6 times the average salary.

It'll be the other way round I think. purchasing power parity for the uk now is due to fall in general which I think means greater wage multipliers for housing debt though credit deleveraging may mean the opposite in lower demand places.
London for example should do the opposite to what you suggest because of more foreign money and their higher comparative purchasing power

The exception would be people in higher demand jobs like computing I guess, they may find their wage multiplier going down


Also now I know why PN has 18k posts, it only takes a second each one at that speed! Where can I measure my WPM, I learnt to type about the same time as learning to write and can do 50wpm maybe but Im told I type completely wrong with incorrect fingers, hands even for each key.

Has anyone had much luck or found credit with non qwerty layouts? I use a mini keyboard so I can do 30wpm with one hand while eating dinner if I like :cool::p



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity

PasturesNew

sabretoothtigger wrote: »

Also now I know why PN has 18k posts, it only takes a second each one at that speed! Where can I measure my WPM, I learnt to type about the same time as learning to write and can do 50wpm maybe but Im told I type completely wrong with incorrect fingers, hands even for each key.

There are a lot of free online speed typing tests, of varying quality. They all work differently.... some will let you make one mistake and mark it as one, if you leave out one letter in one word some are stupid and will then mark every character after that as wrong. Some will have American spelling. Some will require one space after a full stop, some will require two (two is standard for typing, one was standard for typography; once PCs merged the two it became a grey area as to what is correct because it depended on the background of your learning route).

For a standard typing test, any five characters (including spaces) counts as one word. A speed test should be no less than five minutes, preferably 10 minutes. Once you've got to the end, you count the total wpm, based on the point you reached, then deduct 1wpm for each error made. To be a secretary, of course, you did need to be accurate, so it was no good being super fast with a lot of errors.... you had to be fast and 100% accurate. Back then, you'd type something hoping it wasn't going to be altered. If your boss made any changes you literally had to type it from scratch again.