From the pandemic onwards, wages in the private sector have increased faster, says Petter Hällberg, macroeconomist at the government's Mediation Institute.
He emphasizes that it was the opposite during seven, eight years leading up to the pandemic in 2020. Then, wages in the public sector increased a little more than the private ones,
In the latest collective bargaining round, the so-called benchmark for wage increases, a kind of general norm agreed upon between unions and employers, was set at 3.7 percent annual increase. The reality turned out to be that wages in the private sector have an annual growth rate of 4.2 percent, while the public sector falls below the norm, at 3.4 percent.
It cannot continue like this, believes Johan Ingelskog, agreement secretary at the LO union Kommunal, which has, among others, nurses and healthcare assistants as members. If they fare worse in terms of annual wage increases, it erodes trust in how wages are determined, according to Ingelskog.
