According to the autumn labor market survey by wage information agency Palgainfo Agentuur and job classifieds portal CVkeskus.ee, almost one in three employers in Estonia are sure that they will not change their employees’ basic wages in the next eight months, while less than half of employers plan to raise wages, which is a smaller proportion than at the same time last year.
Seventy-two percent of the employers surveyed had changed the basic wages of their employees this year, and in two-thirds of cases the change had been applied to all employees. Basic wages were mostly raised in January or April and the increases were most often in the range of 9-10 percent, the survey revealed.
In their forecasts for the next eight months, 44 percent of employers are planning to raise wages, which is down from 51 percent last year.
Twenty-one percent of employers plan to raise their employees’ salaries in January next year, 11 percent in April and the rest in other months. In most cases, the proposed increase will apply to all employees and will be in the range of 5-10 percent. The wage increases planned last fall were also to apply to all employees in most cases, but there were more employers who planned to raise wages by 9-10 percent.
Twenty-nine percent of employers are convinced that they will not change their employees’ basic salaries in the next eight months. A year ago, far fewer employers, 17 percent, said the same, and there were more of whose who could not say anything about their plans for the future yet.
“Wages will continue to rise, but not in all organizations and not at the same rate as this year and last year,” said Kadri Seeder, manager of Palgainfo Agentuur.
A total of 68 percent of employers had hired employees in the past six months, down from 81 percent at the same time last year. While more than one in two employers, 55 percent, are planning to hire in the next six months, this is still significantly less than at the same time last year, when the ratio of such responses was 70 percent.
“Mostly, the need to hire is related to the need to replace workers, as employees continue to be very active on the labor market,” Grete Adler, head of the recruitment department at CVkeskus.ee, said. Twenty-eight percent of employers plan to create new jobs in the next six months, compared with 34 percent in a similar survey last fall.
Sixteen percent of respondents had laid off employees in the last six months and 10 percent were planning to do so. A year ago, 11 percent of employers had made people redundant and 6 percent were planning to do so.
Source: BNS
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