Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Call it the No-Raises Recovery

This economic recovery is a disappointment for average American families.

Inequality exists in the middle, too.

Politically favored classes of workers - say, government workers or union protected - have gained at the expense of average folks.

Why no redistribution of existing politically favored and government protected jobs?  PB
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From Bloomberg.com:

Only Rich Know Wage Gains With No Raises for U.S Workers

Call it the no-raises recovery: Five years of economic expansion have done almost nothing to boost paychecks for typical American workers while the rich have gotten richer.

Meager improvements since 2009 have barely kept up with a similarly tepid pace of inflation, raising the real value of compensation per hour by only 0.5 percent.

That marks the weakest growth since World War II, with increases averaging 9.2 percent at a similar point in past expansions, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by Bloomberg...

In the U.S., stagnant wages are linked to a question puzzling economists and policy makers alike: How many able and willing workers still are waiting on the sidelines?

Until the economy burns through this excess capacity, employers have little incentive to give raises to attract and maintain employees.

Recoveries in the past exhausted that supply far faster than the current rebound, generating broad-based compensation increases that outpaced the speed of inflation and encouraged consumers to spend.

If the economy had followed the historical relationship between joblessness and earnings, real wages would have been 3.6 percentage points higher by mid-2014, given how much unemployment has declined, according to a Chicago Fed study released last week...
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Link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-19/only-rich-know-wage-gains-with-no-raises-for-u-s-workers.html

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