In a post last fall, I mentioned that average wage increases negotiated in the manufacturing industry in 2012 were, for the first time in a long time, outpacing the previous year’s average at the three-quarter mark. The full-year results are now in, and although they show a slight fourth-quarter dropoff, manufacturing-industry unions in 2012 still clearly maintained their wage gains. The average first-year increase negotiated in manufacturing contracts in 2012 was 2.1 percent, up from 1.8 percent in 2011 and 1.0 percent in 2010.

But that’s not the whole story. The fact is, wages are up all over. First-year wages for all settlements recorded in our database for 2012—from manufacturing to services to government—rebounded nicely from the unprecedented low point of last year.  

All told, the 936 union settlements in 2012, covering more than 1.2 million workers, yielded an average first-year wage increase of 1.6 percent. Historically speaking, this is a pretty anemic showing: First-year wage hikes averaged as high as 3.6 percent as recently as 2008. But considering how far the mark has fallen since then—to 2.3 percent in 2009 and 1.6 percent in 2010 before bottoming out at 1.4 percent in 2011—this new figure suggests that union employers have finally started loosening their purse strings during wage negotiations.

What’s more, big bargaining units appear to be on the leading edge of this upward trend. By counting the total number of employees receiving wage hikes, instead of the number of contracts providing them (better known as calculating the “weighted average”), the improvement in first-year wages is even more pronounced—from 2.4 percent in 2010 to 2.6 percent in 2011 to 2.9 percent last year.

Make no mistake: When it comes to wages, it’s still a payer’s market in union workplaces. First-year increases of more than 4 percent, which were seen in more than one out of every four contracts in 2008, remain almost unheard of nowadays. And there were more first-year wage freezes negotiated in contracts last year then there were in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 combined. But 2011 and 2010 had even more wage freezes than that—further evidence that 2012’s results depict not just a slowdown, but a reversal, of these stingy trends.