The quarterly seasonally-adjusted pace of average weekly ordinary time earnings (AWOTE) rose 1.1 per cent in the three months to February, Australian Bureau of Statistics data released today show.
The annual rate remains above the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) perceived “line in the sand” at 4.5 per cent.
The composition of the AWOTE series tends to make it volatile and why the RBA prefers to use the wage price index – released yesterday – as one of its main guides to wages growth.
That index proved surprisingly benign, given a tight labour market, increasing at its slowest pace since September 2006 for an annual rate of 4.1 per cent in the year to March.
This was down a notch from the 4.2 per cent growth seen during 2007.
Last week the Reserve bank said that while the current level of interest rates was appropriate, it indicated that it would have little tolerance to second-round effects from high inflation, such as rising wages.
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