The back-dated salary payments in the public sector continued to spur the increase in BankservAfrica’s Take-home Pay Index for August, with real salaries showing improvements on both an annual and monthly basis.
According to Shergeran Naidoo, head: stakeholder engagements at BankservAfrica, the average South African take-home salaries increased by 4,7% in real terms on a year-on-year basis.
This represents the largest annual percentage increase in the BankservAfrica dataset since 2012.
“In August, we saw the monthly average real take-home pay reach R14 460 in real terms,” says Naidoo. August’s figure was 2,7% higher on a seasonally adjusted basis than July.
“However, we expect the rate of increase to slow from the current very high rate,” he cautions.
“The strong increase is largely due to the continued ¬delay in government back-dated salary adjustments in the preceding months, which were paid in July and August,” explains Mike Schüssler, chief economist at Economistscoza Delays in municipal and Eskom salary adjustments also contributed to back-dated salary payments in August.”
The other reason for the large real average take-home increase was the decline in inflation, which enabled higher real increases. Inflation unexpectantly declined from 5,1% in July to 4,9% in August.
The typical person’s take-home pay (the person in the middle of the earnings distribution) showed an increase of 1,6% after inflation.
According to Schüssler, the rate of take-home pay increase is likely to stay higher than usual as other wage settlements are still expected in the coming months from large sectors with many employees such as mining.
Putting August data into perspective, in real terms the real average take-home pay was up by 4,4% since August 2013. Considering that the biggest numbers of employees receiving backdated salaries were from the public sector, this increase may not be evident in other parts of the economy.
Interestingly, the previous record level of take-home pay in November 2017 is 0,5% lower than the new record level set in August 2018.
“One would expect that consumer spending, particularly retail sales, will benefit and remain positive for August and September as the extra take-home pay is likely to aid discretionary spending by consumers,” according to Schüssler.
“As such, private consumption expenditure in the third quarter will most likely be substantially higher than the second quarter when employees are still in doubt about the rate of salary adjustments and timing of their actual backdated payments.”
Real average private pensions increased by 4,2%, showing its slowest year-on-year increase, according to Naidoo.
However, he adds that the average BankservAfrica Real Private Pension Index (BPPI) showed a 16,1% increase over the last five years. This indicates the average private pensioner has seen better results from their pension increases compared to those with salaries.
The BPPI in real terms is R 6 888, which is 48,4% of what the average salary is.
Pensioners are growing on the South African national payments system as we have reached over 710 000 pension payments to private pensioners (this excludes old age grants and social pensions).