Employment is up but raises are scarce—at least that’s the conventional wisdom. We have experienced 73 straight months of private job growth—the longest streak on record. Many observers contend that the jobs are low-paying gig-economy or part-time jobs, but in fact nearly all of the added jobs since 2009 have been full-time.
The downside, points out Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, is that average hourly earnings have been somewhat stuck. But he suggests the word “average” in this regard may be misleading. He posits an imaginary car company with rich old baby-boomer engineers and cheap young millennial sales people.
In a recession, Thompson suggests, the company lays off the sales people but keeps its engineers. When the recession ends, it rehires the low-wage sales people. Even if it hires them back at slightly higher wages, the company’s overall average wage is lower than during the engineer-heavy recession. Further, as the baby-boomer engineers retire, their wages drop off the calculation, further reducing the average.
He suggests that continuously employed individuals are seeing real wage growth, and in fact the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Wage Growth Tracker, as reported at Bloomberg, shows that in fact such individuals’ wages did grow faster than average wages.
