The middle class squeeze
Hourly Pay in U.S. Not Keeping Pace With Price Rises
By EDUARDO PORTER
The amount of money workers receive in their paychecks is failing to keep up with inflation. Though wages should recover if businesses continue to hire, three years of job losses have left a large worker surplus.
"There's too much slack in the labor market to generate any pressure on wage growth,'' said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research institution based in Washington. "We are going to need a much lower unemployment rate.'' He noted that at 5.6 percent, the national unemployment rate is still back at the same level as at the end of the recession in November 2001.
Even though the economy has been adding hundreds of thousands of jobs almost every month this year, stagnant wages could put a dent in the prospects for economic growth, some economists say. If incomes continue to lag behind the increase in prices, it may hinder the ability of ordinary workers to spend money at a healthy clip, undermining one of the pillars of the expansion so far.
…On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that hourly earnings of production workers - nonmanagement workers ranging from nurses and teachers to hamburger flippers and assembly-line workers - fell 1.1 percent in June, after accounting for inflation. The June drop, the steepest decline since the depths of recession in mid-1991, came after a 0.8 percent fall in real hourly earnings in May.
Coming on top of a 12-minute drop in the average workweek, the decline in the hourly rate last month cut deeply into workers’ pay. In June, production workers took home $525.84 a week, on average. After accounting for inflation, this is about $8 less than they were pocketing last January. And it is the lowest level of weekly pay since October 2001.
On its own, the decline in workers’ wages is unlikely to derail the recovery. Though they account for some 80 percent of the work force, they contribute much less to spending. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, a research firm, noted that households in the bottom half of the income distribution account only one-third of consumer spending, while those in the top half account for two-thirds.
Nonetheless, coming after the bonanza of the second half of the 1990’s, the first period of sustained real wage growth since the 1970’s, the current slide in earnings is a big blow for the lower middle class. Moreover, the absence of lower income households could also weigh on overall economic growth putting a lid on the mass market and skewing consumption toward high-end products.
