Working Life, Jobs | Wage party in the power industry: Bonuses straight up
The power industry is currently making very good money on sky-high electricity prices. But even before prices skyrocketed towards the end of last year, the industry was financially very lucrative.
Statistics Norway’s wage figures for 2021 show in the business area Electricity, gas and hot water supply, which includes the power supply industry, had the highest wage growth of all sectors last year.
Read more here: Here is the average salary in 361 occupations
The figures, which range from November 2020 to November 2021, ie before the largest price jump, showed a jump of as much as 6.2 per cent.
Higher bonuses
An average monthly salary in the sector is now NOK 67,690, 33 per cent above the average in Norway.
This is also the industry where wage growth increased the most from the previous year, by 4.8 percentage points.
Statistics Norway explains this, among other things much higher bonuseswhere an average bonus increase of 22 percent, to 2,660 kroner a month.
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This corresponds to NOK 31,920 a year and explains around one-third of the wage increase in the industry, which is also good because it was little affected by the corona pandemic.
Before the summer
However, Statistics Norway is clear that this round of bonuses can hardly be explained by high electricity prices this autumn.
– Most of the bonuses in the power industry were paid out before the summer of 2021, ie before electricity prices increased sharply over the autumn, says Håkon Grini in Statistics Norway.
Bonuses are usually paid out in the spring, after the annual result for the company for the year before is ready.
In line – but higher
Aslak Øverås, information manager at Energi Norge, which represents the power industry in NHO, says that wage growth in the power sector has been on a par with the rest of society in recent years.
The average wage growth for the power sector over the two years was 3.85 per cent, which is 20 per cent higher than the average for working life, which was 3.2 per cent.
– When it appears as if the sector received a cannon settlement in 2021, it is due to delays in the settlement for 2020, with mediation only in November. Thus, the payments did not come until 2021, which greatly increases the statistics for this year, Øverås writes in an email to Nettavisen.
However, he says that bonus agreements are not common in the power companies.
– The ones we get to know are not connected to electricity prices, but to conditions such as operational reliability, HSE and the like, writes Øverås.
Here you can also check what the average salary in your industry was: