Raises Won’t Come in 2009
For the seventh year in a row, 2009’s salary raises will only compensate for interest and cost-of-living increases. The 3.8 percent expected raise will do little for most workers, though experts believe that certain top performers will likely receive much larger raises. In addition, one-time performance pay will increase by 10.6 percent, a small number than 2008’s 10.8 percent 2007’s 11.8 percent.
Ken Abosch, of Hewitt Associates, a compensation consulting business, says that “most of the compensation growth today comes from (one-time merit-based) pay - it accounts for almost three-quarters of the increase.” In contrast, more than ten years ago, base pay increases accounted for the majority of all yearly compensation growth. While Abosch did not mention why such trends began, he did note that it will likely continue in coming years.
In fact, in a study by Hewitt Associates, the most common of these one-time performance increases are signing bonuses (65 percent of companies), incentives (63 percent), special reconditions (56 percent), individual performance (41 percent), and retention bonuses (39 percent). Nevertheless, many longtime employees don’t realize that they’re eligible for such bonuses, and so the majority of American workers subsist on cost-of-living raises only. Do yourself a favor, though, and find out whether you are eligible for such an increase - doing so could really help out in the year to come.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 5:07 am and is filed under Jobs & Employment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
