AVERAGE take-home pay has plummeted by nearly £80 a month in 2022, making this year the worst for wage growth in almost half a century, the TUC said today.

The union body’s analysis of official figures reveals that salaries adjusted for soaring inflation have slumped by £76 a month, or 3 per cent over the course of the year — the sharpest fall since 1977 and the second worst since the end of World War II.

But the study, mostly based on Office for National Statistics data, shows that the Tory government’s decision to hold down public-sector wages means that the impact is being disproportionately felt by key workers, the TUC stressed.

The victims of a decade of “pay suppression” — NHS staff, social care workers, local government employees, teachers and others — have now also lost an average of £180 a month since January, it said.

The union body warned that the country’s longest wage squeeze in more than 200 years, a “badge of shame” for successive Conservative administrations, is being “brutally exposed” by 40-year-high double digit price rises. 

General secretary Frances O’Grady said: “People should be able to look forward to Christmas without having to worry about how they’ll pay for it. 

“But family budgets have been shredded by soaring bills and more than a decade of pay being held down.

“The Tories’ failure to get pay rising has left millions of households brutally exposed to the cost-of-living emergency.

“It’s time to reward work — not wealth. We cannot be a country where NHS and teaching staff have to use foodbanks, while City bankers are given unlimited bonuses.”

This year’s strike wave — the biggest to sweep Britain since the1980s — is the result of workers “being pushed to breaking point,” added Ms O’Grady, who demanded ministers engage in “meaningful pay talks.

“Nobody takes strike action lightly,” she said. “If there are strikes across different sectors this winter, the government only have themselves to blame.

“They have chosen to hold down the pay of our Covid-19 pandemic heroes and make the staffing crisis in our public services worse.

“Where unions are allowed to negotiate with employers they’re winning better deals — from buses to BT. 

“But this Conservative government is preventing meaningful negotiations from taking place. Ministers seem more interested in escalating disputes than resolving them.”

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was widely criticised last week for threatening to introduce further curbs on the human right to strike instead of sitting down with unions ahead of national walkouts by rail workers, NHS staff, civil servants and others over Christmas.

The former chancellor’s administration is determined to implement “austerity mark 2 and make workers pay for a crisis that was not of their making,” Unite general secretary Sharon Graham charged.

“The British economy is broken,” she told the Morning Star.

“Energy giants count their profits in billions when millions can’t heat their homes.

“Billionaires and City bankers are told to let it rip by the Chancellor [Jeremy Hunt], who says there’s no money for nurses’ pay.

“Recession or no recession, workers must organise to fight back. Unite has won on wages, conditions and standards, from working hours to working in the cold.

“The rebirth of trade unions is needed more than ever.”