ST7 here, shortly about to CCT and start consultant job in the next couple of weeks. I've had some heated conversations with consultant colleagues around consultant pay/strikes etc.
A common argument I heard against consultants taking industrial action for higher pay is: why are we comparing our current pay to the highest ever (real terms) pay in recent history? And is current consultant output (however you measure that) equivalent to that of circa 2010 when real terms pay was the highest?
The purpose of this post is to help determine how we make the most robust and well evidenced argument to support pay restoration (for consultants & residents)
*disclaimer, I am pro industrial action for both resident & consultant pay*
As a result of these conversations I had a play with Claude to produce some graph to illustrate consultant pay since 1990 against different measures of inflation/cost of living.
I used very basic prompts for the production of these graphs, so they should be easily reproducible.
Consultant pay vs. CPIH since 1990
_________________________________________________________________________________
Consultant pay via RPI since 1990
_________________________________________________________________________________
Consultant pay (nominal) vs. Average UK house prices
Real terms pay changes using CPIH:
- 1990-now: +2%
- 2010-now: -20.6%
Real terms pay changes using RPI:
- 1990-now: -24.6%
- 2010-now: -34.1%
Questions that need a robust answer to:
How do you determine at what point in time you decide to measure current pay against?
How do we justify using RPI as the measure of inflation given it's methodological flaws vs. CPIH (I fully appreciate the argument whereby the government is quite happy to use RPI when its upward bias is favourable for the Treasury e.g. student loans)?
Do we make our argument for pay restoration more robust if we start using CPIH?
I'm open to any and all criticism of the above text & graphs.