Hike in Paycheck

According to the latest survey of employers' pay raise intentions by
WorldatWork, a nonprofit human-resources trade group, more U.S.
workers will soon get a hike in their paychecks. Employers said they
would give raises to 92% of their workers this year, up from 87% last
year, according to this survey of about 2,400 firms employing about
13.9 million workers.

Still, that's off from the 94% of workers granted raises in 2001. The
companies said they'll dole out raises averaging 3.7% of salary this year,
a slight increase from 3.6% last year. They expect the average to inch
up to 3.8% next year. Since those pay hikes just barely clear inflation,
which averaged 3.3% in 2004, it may just be barely minimal to keep
pace with inflation.

[However, there have been worse times in terms of pay hikes in the past.
In 1981, when inflation was running at 10.3%, salary raises averaged
10.6%. And in the early 1990s, pay hikes averaged about 5.6% while
inflation ran at about 5.4%, according to WorldatWork ]

Fewer companies said they're freezing wages. Last year, 2.6% of the
firms said they'd provide no increase at all for hourly workers. That's
dropped to 1.4% this year.