Yoichi Akimoto’s pay has barely grown since he joined a Tokyo apparel company five years ago. He isn’t expecting that to change, even as wages accelerate elsewhere in the world.

“I’m fortunate. I’m still employed,” Mr. Akimoto said. “I know the company is not profitable. It’s only natural that our wages do not increase.”

U.S. workers are getting...

Yoichi Akimoto’s pay has barely grown since he joined a Tokyo apparel company five years ago. He isn’t expecting that to change, even as wages accelerate elsewhere in the world.

“I’m fortunate. I’m still employed,” Mr. Akimoto said. “I know the company is not profitable. It’s only natural that our wages do not increase.”

U.S. workers are getting their largest pay bumps in three decades, while wages in the U.K. are outpacing inflation. But for employees in some large Asia-Pacific economies, it is the opposite experience. Many are struggling to negotiate a wage increase—if they can get one—that covers higher consumer prices.

It is a stark divergence as the global economy recovers from the Covid-19 pandemic, with implications for how quickly central banks tighten monetary policy in response to price pressures, including through raising interest rates.

The Bank of Japan headquarters in Tokyo. Central banks are working out how quickly they should tighten monetary policy in response to price pressures.

Photo: Toru Hanai/Bloomberg News

In the U.S., wages rose 4.2% in the three months through September from a year earlier, the fastest increase since 1990 as labor shortages in a widening range of industries prompted employers to raise pay. Companies could attempt to pass on higher labor costs to customers, driving inflation, which hit a 31-year high in October. The inflation surge is complicating the Federal Reserve’s strategy for unwinding the easy-money policies the central bank imposed early in the pandemic.

In contrast, Australian pay raises remain below the 3% annual increase that the country’s central bank has indicated as a key threshold for raising interest rates from a low of 0.10%. The average wage in Japan stood at the equivalent of $39,000 in 2020, an increase of only 4% over three decades.

Many of the headwinds driving up wages in the U.S. are buffeting the Asia-Pacific region. Clogged supply chains have driven up the cost of raw materials for manufacturers, while making imported goods more expensive as shipping rates rise. Energy prices are on a tear as the global economic recovery stimulates oil demand. Industries including construction and healthcare say they are short of workers.

The Omicron variant of Covid-19 could intensify those pressures by further disrupting supply chains, while some governments are already reintroducing border controls and slowing reopening plans.

A shipping terminal in Yokohama, Japan. The headwinds driving up wages in the U.S. are also buffeting the Asia-Pacific.

Photo: Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg News

Still, policy makers point to differences that help to explain why wage growth is weaker in Japan and Australia than the U.S. They include the participation rate—the share of the population aged 16 years or older either working or looking for work.

More than a year and a half into the pandemic, the U.S. is still missing about 4.3 million workers. In September, the U.S. participation rate was 61.6%, having stood at 63.3% in February 2020 before the pandemic hit. In Australia, however, the participation rate hit a record 66.3% this year, before an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta strain of Covid-19 in June triggered lockdowns in Sydney.

“This has also been the experience in several countries in Asia, including Japan, where workers remained attached to their employers throughout the pandemic and where labor-force-participation rates remained close to record highs,” Philip Lowe, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, said in a recent speech on inflation trends.

Australia has recorded about 210,000 coronavirus cases and more than 2,000 deaths since the pandemic began, compared with more than 48 million infections and 780,000 deaths in the U.S. That relatively low case count could have made Australians less fearful about returning to work, particularly in jobs such as retail and hospitality that require face-to-face interaction with customers, Mr. Lowe said. He also said the closure of U.S. schools likely squeezed the workforce there.

Shoppers in Sydney last week. Australian pay raises remain below the 3% annual increase that the country’s central bank sees as a key threshold for raising interest rates.

Photo: Hu Jingchen/Xinhua/Zuma Press

Shane Oliver, chief economist at Australian wealth manager AMP Capital, said higher minimum wages than many other countries and the success of government measures to prevent mass layoffs early in the pandemic, including a $64 billion wage subsidy, likely played a role in keeping Australians employed or at least looking for work.

Some economists say pandemic programs to stave off job losses, including widespread furloughing of workers, could also be playing a role in restraining pay raises in Europe.

Europe’s statistics agencies have yet to release wage data for the three months through September, but recent pay deals that have been made public suggest there hasn’t been a strong pickup, despite a surge in inflation. With many wage deals negotiated in the early months of the year, some economists expect to see a rise as workers seek to protect their real incomes following a jump in inflation that has been driven by energy prices.

“I don’t think we’ve seen the beginning of that yet given typical lags between inflation and negotiated wages,” said Paul Hollingsworth, chief European economist at BNP Paribas. “So really, let’s see where we are in the middle of next year, to see if this really starts to feed through.”

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell discussed in a Senate hearing the factors driving continued inflation and the risk the Omicron variant poses for the economy. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg News The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition

Lauren Whelan, a 37-year-old store manager at a retail-travel business in Sydney, stayed working even as the shutdown of airline travel ate into her income. “Due to sales being at zero for the majority of the pandemic I have been down to base only, which is some 30% to 50% less than my usual income,” she said. Still, that hit followed weak annual increments to her base salary for several years before, she said.

Australia’s unemployment rate jumped to 5.2% in October from 4.6% in September as the number of people seeking work rose with the easing of Covid-19 lockdowns in the country’s most populous state. The RBA expects it to moderate to 4.75% by the end of 2021 before drifting lower to 4.0% two years later.

During the pandemic year of 2020, the jobless rate in Japan rose to 2.8% from 2.4% a year earlier. Yet the level is lower and the change is much smaller when compared with the U.S., where the jobless rate shot above 10% in the early stages of the pandemic and remained at 6.7% in the fourth quarter of 2020.

In Japan, job security is more important than pay raises, a mind-set ingrained in both managers and workers after the collapse of the economic bubble 30 years ago, said Tomohisa Ishikawa, an economist at the Japan Research Institute, a unit of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in Tokyo late last month.

Photo: kiyoshi ota/Press Pool

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida made sharply improving pay a key plank of his successful campaign in September to become head of the ruling party, but the idea seems to have already died down.

“I would say, ‘Why don’t you do it, if you could?’ ” to Mr. Kishida, said Shu Shiratsuchi, who works at a restaurant for $12 an hour. Mr. Shiratsuchi, 28 years old, said he is struggling financially because he is only getting 70% of the shifts he got before the pandemic.

Japanese are shy about negotiating wages owing to the culture that frowns on appearing greedy, business consultants say. A 2020 survey by Recruit Co., a company that helps match employers and workers, found that when joining a company, 62% of Japanese workers didn’t negotiate over their wages, whereas most Americans did.

But it isn’t just culture that hinders wage increases. Consumer spending hasn’t grown much over the years, the flip side of stagnant wages, Mr. Ishikawa said.

More than 30% of company unions in Japan didn’t ask for a wage rise this year, according to labor ministry data, but there are early signs of friction in Australia’s labor market. Workers at seven Australian distribution centers owned by logistics company Toll Group spent two days on strike last month before securing an agreement that included an annual 3% pay raise for three years.

The ability of workers to secure outsize pay increases could depend on how quickly countries that have kept Covid-19 cases low can reopen their borders and encourage immigration. An influx of foreign labor would put downward pressure on wage growth.

Travelers queue for coronavirus tests at Sydney Airport on Monday. Australia has postponed the planned reopening of its international border to fully vaccinated skilled workers to help to better understand the new Omicron variant.

Photo: LOREN ELLIOTT/REUTERS

The Omicron variant is already slowing reopening plans. Australia on Nov. 29 postponed by two weeks the planned reopening of its international border to fully vaccinated skilled workers, because it wanted time to better understand the new variant. The same day, Japan said it would close its borders to foreigners, including business travelers, until the end of the year.

Foreign labor in Australia accounted for about 500,000 workers before the pandemic, but that has dropped to fewer than 90,000 workers, said Paul Bloxham, chief economist for Australia at HSBC Holdings PLC.

The Japan Research Institute’s Mr. Ishikawa believes that wages in Japan are likely to rise in the near future, owing to emerging labor shortages. But Japan’s record on wages could be a deterrent to foreign workers, who often fill jobs such as taking care of the elderly or farming. Most of the country’s foreign labor comes from China, Vietnam and the Philippines.

He said low prices in Japan are also reaching their limit.

Matsuya Foods Co, which operates chain restaurants, raised the price for a bowl of beef and rice—its flagship product—by 19% to 380 yen, equivalent to $3.37, at the end of September. The company, which lost customers when it raised the price by 26 cents three years ago, carefully timed this price increase to coincide with the lifting of a pandemic state of emergency.

“Customers are returning to the pre-pandemic level,” a company spokeswoman said. As for wages, “They’re not rising, but not going down either,” she said.

—Paul Hannon contributed to this article

Write to James Glynn at james.glynn@wsj.com and Miho Inada at miho.inada@wsj.com