31  Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (2017). 15  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  15  References Abel, W, Tenreyro, S and Thwaites, G (forthcoming), ‘Monopsony in the UK’, LSE Centre for Economic Performance. Acemoglu, D and Restrepo, P (2017), ‘Robots and Jobs: Evidence from US Labor Markets’, NBER Working Paper, No. 23285. Autor, D, Dorn, D, Katz, L, Patterson, C and Van Reenen, J (2017a), ‘The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms’, NBER Working Paper, No. 23396. Autor, D, Dorn, D, Katz, L, Patterson, C and Van Reenen, J (2017b), ‘Concentrating on the Fall of the Labor Share’, American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, Vol. 107, No. 5, pp. 180-185. Bell, D and Blanchflower, D (2018), ‘Underemployment and the Lack of Wage Pressure in the UK’, National Institute Economic Review, Vol. 243, No. 1, pp. R53 - R61. Benmelech, E, Bergman, N and Kim, H (2018), ‘Strong Employers and Weak Employees: How Does Employer Concentration Affect Wages?’, NBER Working Paper, No. 24307. Bradley, J (2016), ‘Self-employment in an equilibrium model of the labor market’, IZA Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 5, No. 6. Bryson, A (2014), ‘Union wage effects’, article for IZA World of Labor. Coibion, O and Gorodnichenko, Y (2015), ‘Is the Phillips Curve Alive and Well after All? Inflation Expectations and the Missing Disinflation’, American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 197-232.
The world of work is being reshaped in many advanced economies by the secular fall in the degree of unionisation and collective bargaining, by changes in employment contracts and working patterns and by rises in the degree of concentration and automation in the company sector. By reducing workers’ “pay power”, they too have depressed wage growth, actually and prospectively. I will start by discussing recent pay developments and the factors responsible for driving them, cyclical and structural. I will then discuss the implications of these cyclical and structural factors for domestic cost growth, inflationary pressures and hence for monetary policy in the period ahead. Jobs and Pay  I do not need to tell this audience that the past decade has been a strikingly weak one for pay growth. Ten years ago, the mean weekly wage in the UK was around £ per week. A decade on, it has risen to £  2  All speeches are available online at www.bankofengland.co.uk/speeches  2  per week, an average annual rise of less than 2% in money terms. This makes it the weakest decade for growth in money wages for British workers since the 1930s. That is not the end of the story, of course. Over the same period, consumer prices in the UK have risen by, on average, 2.2% per year. That means inflation-adjusted, or real, pay has fallen by around 3.7% cumulatively over the past decade.