Germany tops world for shrinking wages - The Local

Worker's pay packets over the past decade have shrunk more in Germany than any other industrialised country, a report released Wednesday has found.

The Global Wage Report by the International Labor Organization - a United Nations agency in which workers, employers and governments are represented - found that gross wages fell 4.5 percent when adjusted for inflation, according to news magazine Der Spiegel.

Low wage growth has been widely credited for the competitiveness that has allowed Europe's biggest economy to recover swiftly from the global downturn.

But the ILO challenged this idea, pointing out that the slump results from the increasing number of part-time jobs in Germany.

No other industrialised country experienced such a backslide, the report said. Of all the industrialised nations, Norway, Cyprus and Finland enjoyed the strongest wage growth, with Norway posting an increase of 25.1 percent.