Today’s jobs report showed that average hourly earnings rose by 2.5% from a year earlier, a figure that many economists have flagged as disappointing. After all, compared with wage growth in the 1980s, 1990s and mid-2000s, today’s wage gains appear to be on the lackluster side.
The above chart shows wages for all nonproduction and supervisory workers over the past 30 years. It’s not adjusted for inflation, and we’ll get back to that.
Today’s sluggishness appears to be quite broad-based. For the most part, it’s not the case that jobs are being disproportionately generated in industries with low wage growth. In fact, the relatively low rate of wage growth is common across industries. The fastest-growing industry is utilities and the slowest-growing is transportation and warehousing, but both are on the small side, with only about half a million utilities workers and a bit under five million in transportation. The vast majority of the nation’s 143 million payroll employees are in industries with slow growth.
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