HHistorically, wages in France have experienced successive periods of increases and slowdowns, although the average net annual salary quintupled between 1913 and 2020, an increase of around 1.6% per year. After the significant improvements of the Belle Epoque, from 1900 to 1914, choppy phases of slowdowns and accelerations followed one another from 1913 to 1950 depending on wars and economic crises, before experiencing strong growth from 1950 to 1980 – the real wages tripled over the period – then a phase of slowdown since 1980.
The average salary of course changes according to the growth in gross domestic product per hour worked (productivity), the rise in prices (8% per year over a century) and the unemployment rate. But the salaried labor market is not the simple addition of individual meetings between an employer and an employee, as economic theory tends to conceptualize it. It depends on the interaction between five stakeholders: employees themselves, unions, employers and their unions, public authorities and the international labor market, which has a growing role. These restoring forces affect both average wages and wage gaps.
If the engineer earns several times the salary of the laborer, it is because, according to economists, the qualifications and responsibilities of the former make him rarer in the creation of added value for the company, and therefore more expensive. Qualifications thus define the largest salary gaps, but there are also differences depending on age, gender, company size, sector or region. Innovation also generates the appearance of new, better paid professions (IT, marketing).
Low opening of the salary range
In France, the gap between the 10% best paid employees and the 10% lowest paid was 3 in 1950. Boosted by growth, it reached 4.1 in 1967 before returning to 3 at the beginning of the 1950s. 1980, a position he has not left since, as in countries with the least open salary scales (Germany, Sweden). In the United States this gap is 5.
Four forces maintain the narrow opening of the salary range. First, the public service (central, territorial and hospital), which represents around 20% of the workforce, is located at the center of the salary range, with a narrower scale than that of the private sector.
The second stabilizer is the social state which, since the years 1945-1948, has created an “extra salary” for health, retirement, family and employment, i.e. a quarter of additional income made up of benefits. The third stabilizer is the set of collective agreements that appeared in 1891, then deployed from 1950. They cover a majority of employees and tend to align companies in the same sector on a convergent level, even if conventional decentralization since 1982 increased the individualization of provisions. Despite their sometimes spectacular side, strikes are less effective than collective bargaining in increasing wages.
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