U.S. employees will get pay raises averaging 3 percent this year, dismal by historical standards. Around the world, pay’s getting chopped hard, but increases are still bigger than in the U.S. In the Asia-Pacific region, for example, raises will be reduced by an average of 1.7 percent, but that still leaves them at 5.2 percent. They’re being cut in Latin America, but people are still going to get double-digit raises, on average.
Hewitt Associates studied more than 2,000 companies representing more than 25 million employees in 40 countries at the end of 2008, and found them responding the following way to the weak economy:
| Asia-Pacific | Europe | Latin America | U.S. | ||
| Cuts to Salary Increases | 58% | 67% | 63% | 50% | |
| Hiring freezes | 42% | 63% | 66% | 39% | |
| Pay freezes | 6% | 20% | 23% | 10% | |
| Layoffs | 19% | 69% | 33% | 35% | |
| Salary cuts – execs Salary cuts – all employees | 4% 2% | 9% 0% | 9% 0% | 1% 1% | |
| Increasing time between increases | 12% | 29% | 22% | 0% | |
| Reducing promotions | 28% | 28% | 23% | 17% |
Hewitt reports that “two-thirds of companies (66 percent) in Latin America, 62 percent of companies in Europe, and more than half (59 percent) of companies in Asia-Pacific are setting aside a separate pool of money to reward high performers.” In the U.S., 18 percent are offering retention bonuses to high performers, and in Latin America, 16 percent are.