(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Pro-Immigration Labor Shortage Claims Keep Going Up as Real Wages Keep Going Down

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compensation, Employment Cost Index, immigrants, Immigration, inflation, inflation-adjusted wages, Labor Department, labor shortage, productivity, wages, Washington Post, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s as if the Open Borders Lobby – both its conservative and liberal wings – has recently decided that it’s really had enough of labor market tightness that’s due to reduced immigration, and that’s also giving so many of America’s workers a long-needed pay raise. So it’s been re-upping the pressure to open the floodgates once again and solve this terrible problem. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

As is so often the case, the Open Borders-happy Washington Post editorial board has made the case most succinctly: “[C]ompanies are frantically trying to hire enough workers to keep up with the surge in demand for everything from waffle irons to cars. The nation has more than 11 million job openings and 6 million unemployed.

“This imbalance is giving workers and job seekers tremendous power. Pay is rising at the fastest pace in years….”

Yet this claim is not only profoundly anti-American worker. It’s completely false – at least if you look at the only measures of pay that reveal anything about whether employees are getting ahead or not. And they’re of course the compensation measures adjusted for inflation.

What do they show? Between 2020 and 2021, inflation-adjusted hourly pay for all U.S. workers in the private sector were down by 2.10 percent and for blue-collar workers by 1.52 percent. (As known by RealityChek regulars, the U.S. Labor Department that tracks pay trends for the federal government doesn’t monitor any type of compensation for public sector workers because their wages and salaries and benefits are determined largely by politicians’ decisions, not the forces of supply and demand. As a result, they’re thought to say little about the labor market’s true strengths or weaknesses.)

Do you know when such wages have fallen by that much? Try “never” for the entire workforce (where the Labor Department data go back to 2006), and for blue collar workers, several times during the 1970s, which were a terrible time for the economy overall. (For this group, the official numbers go back to 1964).

But haven’t better benefits compensated? Two Labor Department data sets do measure changes in all forms of compensation. The best known, and the one most closely followed by the Federal Reserve and leading economists everywhere, is the Employment Cost Index (ECI). It covers state and local government (though not federal) employees as well as private sector workers. But there’s no evidence of any inflation-adjusted gains for the nation’s workforce – much less outsized gains – from these statistics either.

From the fourth quarter of 2020 to the fourth quarter of 2021, this index did increase by 4.37 percent for all covered workers (breakouts for white- and blue-collar employees only go up to 2006). Yet during this period, the Labor Department’s inflation measure, the Consumer Price Index, was up 7.42 percent. That’s called “falling behind” in my book.

When business (and government on the state and local levels) starts offering pay that’s rising higher than the inflation rate, then Americans as a whole can start worrying about genuine labor shortages. (And even then, as I’ve written, it would be much better for the economy as a whole if companies responded by boosting their productivity, rather than by agitating for more mass immigation with the aim of driving wages down and of course dodging any incentives to operate more efficiently.) For now, though, it’s obvious that what U.S. business is “frantic” about (to use the Post‘s term) isn’t a shortage of workers. It’s a shortage of cheap workers.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: New U.S. Pay Figures Show a Recent Fade – Especially in Manufacturing

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benefits, compensation, ECEC, employer costs, salaries, Trump, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

This morning the federal government released one of the more unusual takes on Americans’ pay that we regularly see – the latest quarterly report on “Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC).” It’s unusual because it measures not only wages and salaries, but non-wage benefits. And that’s something of a two-edged sword.

On the one hand, the ECEC series’ comprehensiveness provides a fuller picture of compensation trends in the U.S. labor market than the wage figures alone (which come out monthly, and therefore are somewhat more current). On the other, because it focuses (as per the name) on compensation from the employer’s end, it includes a great deal of info on practices that never translate into money in their workers’ pockets. After all, few if any workers realize the full value of their benefits packages.

The ECEC series presents analysts with another problem: the current-dollar data only go back to 2004. So it’s not possible to compare the economy’s performance on this front over similar phases of the various recent business cycles.

Even so, three important conclusions can be drawn from the latest data – which takes the story up to full-year 2018. First, they confirm what the wage statistics reveal about manufacturing being a compensation laggard during the current economic recovery compared with the rest of the private sector (I exclude government employee data from this post because compensation decisions in the public sector are set mainly by politicians’ decisions, as opposed to market forces. As a result, they say relatively little about the fundamental state of the economy.)

Second, they show that for both private sector (PS) workers as a whole and manufacturing workers, wages and salaries have been growing more slowly than benefits. And third, they show that increases in all these forms of compensation for both private sector and manufacturing workers slowed somewhat during the second year of the Trump administration, and that the improvement for manufacturing workers essentially halted the year before – and in some cases, shifted into reverse.

Here are figures for compensation cost changes for the duration of the current expansion – which began in mid-2009:

Total compensation for all PS workers:                     +24.18 percent

Total compensation for manufacturing workers:       +21.97 percent

Wages and salaries for all PS workers:                      +23.00 percent

Wages and salaries for manufacturing workers:        +20.59 percent

Total benefits for all PS workers:                              +27.18 percent

Total benefits for manufacturing workers:                +24.56 percent

If you do a little more math, you’ll see that private sector compensation costs generally advanced at a rate 10.06 percent faster than total compensation in manufacturing; that private sector wages and salaries costs went up 11.70 percent faster than their manufacturing counterparts; and that benefits costs rose 10.67 percent faster.

Now let’s look at the annual changes in each variety of compensation costs since 2009. The figures show changes between the fourth quarters of each year, and if you look at the 2016-17 data and the 2017-18 data, you see the growth slowdowns and actual backsliding in manufacturing mentioned above.

            PS comp   mfg comp   PS wages  mfg wages  PS bens   mfg benefits

09-10:   +1.20%    +0.94%      +1.18%     +0.14%     +1.38%     +2.52%

10-11:   +2.95%    +2.20%      +2.55%     +1.60%     +3.95%     +3.37%

11-12:   +1.05%    +1.79%      +0.89%    + 2.13%     +1.42%     +1.15%

12-13:   +2.63%    +4.83%     +2.17%     +4.08%      +3.74%     +6.28%

13-14:   +5.70%    +4.52%     +4.62%     +4.36%      +8.23%     +4.84%

14-15:    +1.21%   +4.82%     +1.93%     +4.30%       -0.31%     +5.79%

15-16/;   +3.34%   +2.16%     +3.12%     +2.56%      +3.76%     +1.41%

16-17:    +2.93%    -0.89%     +2.80%      -0.74%      +3.22%     -1.77%

17-18:    +0.98%    +0.28%    +1.62%     +0.63%      -0.49%      -0.44%

Another noteworthy characteristic displayed by these numbers: They can be very volatile. For optimists, this choppiness may be a sign that manufacturing compensation will turn another corner, and that overall private sector compensation will rise at an accelerating rate. They could also explain the relatively weak manufacturing results as a sign that, as has been widely claimed and that I’ve discussed previously, that industry is attracting job-seekers whose qualifications are so threadbare that they can’t command premium wages and benefits even in the currently tight national labor market.

Pessimists can counter by contending that recovery-era compensation increases have surely peaked, either since the expansion will surely peter out soon simply because it’s already lasted so long, or because the boost received from the President Trump’s tax cuts has run its course, or both.

I’ll stay agnostic for now. But I feel pretty confident that if you look at the ECEC figures that start coming out in mid-2020, you’ll have a decent idea of who America’s next president will be.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Industries Claiming Labor Shortages are Productivity as Well as Wage Laggards

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compensation, Labor Department, labor productivity, labor shortages, productivity, restaurants, trucking, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

The labor shortage claims from American businesses keep filling the media (even though wages, which are supposed to rise sharply in such circumstances, are improving only sluggishly). So it was more than a little interesting to look over the latest statistics on labor productivity released by the Department of Labor.

After all, companies and industries really facing dire labor shortages, and unwilling or unable to raise wages, are supposed to boost their productivity (generally by introducing labor-saving devices and practices). But the new Labor Department numbers show that they’re doing surprisingly little on this front, either.

Let’s examine two sectors of the economy that say with special vigor that they’re running out of workers: trucking and restaurants.

According to a typical account (from yesterday’s Washington Post), American trucking companies are facing “an extraordinary labor shortage” and their CEOs (including industry veterans) are saying things like “I’ve never seen it like this, ever….It doesn’t matter what the load even pays. There are just not drivers.”

The sector does appear to be raising pay. But not until the last two years have its overall employment costs been rising faster than those for the private sector overall – and the latter’s increases have hardly impressed. These data cover the entire transportation and warehousing sector, but after shooting up from a 2.1 percent annual pre-inflation pace to four percent (between the fourth quarters of 2011 and 2012), total compensation advances slowed to 2.3 percent annually during the next two years, and then to 2.2 percent in 2015 before accelerating.

Moreover, trucking industry productivity growth hasn’t been world-beating, either. The Labor Department reported last week that its overall gain in labor productivity (the narrower of two productivity growth measures tracked by Labor, but the one whose data is more up to date) in 2017 was 0.8 percent. A comparable figure for services industries in general isn’t available, but the Department does track labor productivity for non-farm businesses and for manufacturing.

Since labor productivity productivity for the former increased by 1.3 percent in 2017 and only 0.4 percent in manufacturing, it seems safe to conclude that services sector labor productivity grew by more than 1.3 percent – and therefore much more than trucking’s 0.8 percent. Nor does this picture change much going back to 2013.

Further, a remarkably similar pattern emerges upon examining the restaurant business. Labor shortages are widely claimed and reported, along with examples of the industry starting to improve compensation practices. New technologies are also apparently being tried to improve efficiency in the sector. But according to the data, these responses to the purported shortage of workers have been belated at best.

For example, as with trucking, annual total compensation gains in the accommodation and food services sectors (no restaurant-specific numbers are available) trailed those for the overall private sector for several years until 2016. And their owners and lobbyists have been making labor shortage claims for at least that long.

Data for restaurants (and bars) specifically are available for their labor productivity, and their performance here is only roughly comparable to the dreary results for non-manufacturing non-farm businesses.

Industries like trucking and restaurants may indeed not be able to choose their employees from as many applicants as they would like, or from numbers to which they’ve become accustomed. But if they haven’t been doing anything special, at least until recently either to hike pay, improve productivity, or both, then several explanations are possible. Maybe they’re waiting for another wave of wage-depressing legal and illegal immigrants to save their days without the need to fatten paychecks of invest in new plant and equipment. Maybe they’re don’t know how to improve productivity in particular, in which case, their businesses simply may not be viable, or they’re simply lousy managers.

But unless the Labor Department figures are completely off-base, one explanation we can rule out completely is that, as groups, they’re utterly desperate for workers.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Wage Inflation Claims are Still Grossly Inflated

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benefits, compensation, ECI, Employment Cost Index, inflation, salaries, wages, workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you were examining whether American workers’ pay was finally beginning to rise at a rate consistent with a lengthy economic recovery and an apparently tight labor market, wouldn’t you focus on pay adjusted for inflation – which gauges whether these workers are keeping up with living costs? And wouldn’t you focus more on trends in the private sector (where wages, salaries, and benefits are set mainly by market forces, and therefore say something meaningful about the economy’s fundamentals) than in the public sector (where they’re set by government fiat)?

The alarm and enthusiasm (depending on your perspective) with which last week’s Labor Department figures on employment costs were greeted makes clear that both these best practices of economic analysis were widely ignored.

As the Department reported, the Employment Cost Index (ECI) – the compensation measure that includes all forms of pay and benefits – rose 2.71 percent on year in the first quarter of this year for “civilian workers.” That category includes the public sector, and was indeed the strongest such increase since 2008.

The numbers were even better in private industry: a 2.81 percent yearly gain. That’s also the best since 2008 (the third quarter’s 2.84 percent).

Adjust for inflation, though – that is, see the extent to which workers are staying ahead of living costs, not to mention the extent to which they are leading overall price rises – and the story looks very different.

According to the price-adjusted ECI issued by the Labor Department, during the first quarter of this year, compensation for civilian workers increased by 0.38 percent year-on-year. That’s actually lower than the annual increase for the previous quarter (0.48 percent). In fact, on a sequential (quarter-to-quarter) basis, the real ECI fell (by 0.29 percent).

That annual gain was indeed better than that for the first quarter of 2017 – when there was no increase in the inflation-adjusted ECI at all. But it wasn’t as good at the 0.87 percent improvement from the first quarter of 2015 to the first quarter of 2016. And it wasn’t even close to the 2.59 percent rise registered between the previous first quarters. So let’s recognize that, during the first quarter of 2018, the real ECI did nothing special – at best.

The story is just as unexciting – and contrary to accelerating wage inflation claims – in the private sector. Its real ECI increased by 0.39 percent annually during the first quarter, and also fell (by 0.19 percent) sequentially.

Between the previous first quarters, the real ECI flat-lined, too, after advancing by 0.97 percent the year before and 2.70 percent the year before that.

Some day, American workers may actually experience another genuine acceleration in their real compensation, and thus a genuine increase in their living standards. But looking at the most revealing version of the Employment Cost Index makes painfully clear that that day still lies in the future.

Making News: Cited in The Daily Beast, on MSN.com – & More!

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compensation, Gordon G. Chang, IndustryToday.com, Making News, manufacturing, msn.com, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Daily Beast, Trade, Trump, wages

I’m pleased to announce more recent media appearances.

On January 31, IndustryToday.com re-published my post that day the ambiguous data put out by the Labor Department on American workers’ pay broadly defined. Here’s the link.

Two days before, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran a feature article largely based on my latest analysis of manufacturing wages – and why they’ve been performing so poorly. Click here to read. It was also good to see this piece picked up in msn.com‘s “Money” section.

Finally, on January 25, Gordon G. Chang quoted me in this DailyBeast.com post on where we stand with President Trump’s approach to the world trade system.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for the latest on media appearances and other developments.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: What Blue-Collar Pay Surge?

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benefits, blue-collar workers, Bureau of Labor Statistics, compensation, managers, minimum wage, professionals, salaries, The Economist, wages, White-collar workers, {What's Left of) Our Economy

That was some claim made by The Economist earlier this month about blue-collar wages in America: They “have begun to rocket. In the year to the third quarter, wage and salary growth for the likes of factory workers, builders and drivers easily outstripped that for professionals and managers.” Even better, these workers, whose pay stagnation has practically defined the so far weak U.S. economic recovery from the Great Recession, have been enjoying pace-setting compensation gains for the last five years, the magazine writes.

I’d be feeling awfully good about this development – except the article in question was a model of overly enthusiastic cheerleading. More specifically, it’s a great example of how failing to look at statistics in enough detail can produce seriously flawed pictures of the economy.

The heart of The Economist‘s case is this chart, which shows that overall compensation (wages, salaries, and benefits) for occupations that don’t involve managerial, executive, or high level administrative responsibilities, and that lie outside the professions, has been rising faster than compensation for occupations that do deal with these matters.

But even a glance should reveal a serious potential problem – the categories are awfully broad. In fact, they lump together lots of occupations that on their own seem awfully big. (To be sure, the source – the Bureau of Labor Statistics – uses these categories. But it presents narrower ones, too.] Further, the five-year period The Economist uses as its longest-run time frame is a period that’s economically meaningless. And in fact, disaggregating those occupational categories and using an economically meaningful long-term time frame (the duration of the current recovery) yields significantly different results.

For example, according to the chart, the big American compensation winner has been the “production, transportation, and material moving” cluster. Adjusted for inflation (which the magazine doesn’t do), here’s how its compensation (including for government workers in these occupations) has improved over the latest quarter year for which data are available, the latest year for which we have statistics, and since the recovery began:

2Q 2017-3Q 2017: +0.38 percent

3Q 2016-3Q2017: +1.06 percent

current recovery: +5.56 percent

This performance is indeed much better than the super-category covering white-collar workers – “management, professional, and related” workers:

2Q 2017-3Q 2017: -0.01 percent

3Q 2016-3Q 2017: +0.01 percent

current recovery: +2.86 percent

But look what happens when you separate production workers from the transportation and material moving workforce:

2Q 2017-3Q 2017: +0.49 percent

3Q 2016-3Q 2017: +0.79 percent

current recovery: +4.58 percent

The compensation gains are still better than those for the managers. But the gap is a good deal smaller.

Now let’s remove professional workers from the management cluster. The compensation increases for business and financial managers are:

2Q 2017-3Q 2017: -0.01 percent

3Q 2016-3Q 2017: +0.57 percent

current recovery: +4.48 percent

Except for the latest quarterly figure, they’re pretty comparable to the advances for the production workers.

Now let’s look at another blue-collar category – “office and administrative support.” Compensation increases for the relevant time frames are as follows:

2Q 2017-3Q 2017: -0.009 percent

3Q 2016-3Q 2017: +0.19 percent

current recovery: +4.63 percent

These increases over the short-term are actually somewhat weaker than for the business and financial managers. When it comes to “installation, maintenance, and repair,” the latest quarterly compensation gains were a bit better than those for the business and financial managers. But the latest yearly and recovery era increases for the installation category were worse than those for the business and financial managers.

2Q 2017-3Q 2017: +0.01 percent

3Q 2016-3Q 2017: +0.39 percent

current recovery: +4.40 percent

And we see the same kinds of numbers for the catch-all “service operations” category:

2Q17-3Q17: -0.01 percent

3Q16-3Q17: +0.38 percent

current recovery: +3.04 percent

So what’s really going on here is that compensation for some blue-collar workers has recently begun to rise faster than compensation for some white-collar workers, and that compensation for some white-collar workers continues to rise faster than compensation for some blue-collar workers. And let’s not forget how governments across the country have acted in the last few years to juice blue-collar pay – by raising the minimum wage. These actions, whatever their substantive merits or flaws, tell us nothing about underlying trends shaping the economy.

Yes, it’s hard to turn those observations into a catchy headline and an eye-opening story. But that’s why discerning readers have learned to distinguish journalism from clickbait.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: New Evidence of a Crossroads for the U.S. Jobs Market

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benefits, compensation, Employment Cost Index, Federal Reserve, inflation, Labor Department, labor market, labor unions, private sector, recovery, salaries, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

If you’re one of the American workers who’s been happy with the current economic recovery, you might have already seen peak pay gains. If you haven’t been satisfied, get ready for greater disappointment. And whatever category you fall into, you’d better hope that new U.S. government data on overall compensation paid by American employers is just a blip. Ditto that for the Federal Reserve, which is set to announce its latest decision on interest rates later today, and which seems convinced that the American labor market is healthy enough to withstand a series of hikes back toward historically normal levels.

Last week, the Labor Department issued its latest quarterly report on how much business shells out in terms of both wages, salaries, and benefits. The results in the main release looked pretty good, but they’re not adjusted for inflation – which means that they don’t tell the full story about whether or not compensation is keeping up with the cost of living. Luckily, Labor released the inflation-adjusted figures, too, and they make clear that whatever real compensation progress workers might have been recently been making could be in danger.

According to these constant-dollar Employment Cost Index (ECI) figures, real pay for all private sector workers was flat year-on-year for the quarter ending in March. (I don’t usually examine pay data that include government workers because their compensation is set overwhelmingly by political decisions, not market forces, and therefore don’t say much about the underlying strength of the labor market or the broader economy.)

That annual result was the worst since the quarter ending in June, 2014 – when after-inflation compensation also flatlined on an annual basis. By comparison, the real ECI between that first quarter of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016 rose by 0.97 percent.

Looked at quarter-to-quarter, the real ECI for private sector workers fell by 0.10 percent. The previous sequential change was a 0.29 percent improvement. Indeed, the latest numbers broke a two-quarter string of gains.

From a longer-range perspective, however, the current recovery still stacks up pretty well for private sector workers (although the data only go back to mid-2001). Since it began, in mid-2009, their total compensation is up by 3.60 percent. During the previous (shorter) expansion – which ran from late 2001 through late 2007, total inflation-adjusted compensation rose by only 2.36 percent.

The new real ECI results reveal similar trends for American manufacturing workers. The first quarter’s year-on-year 0.20 percent drop was the worst such result since an identical decrease in the final quarter of 2012. And the previous first quarter annual change was a 1.49 percent rise.

Sequentially, real manufacturing compensation also fell during the first quarter – by 0.29 percent. And as with overall private sector compensation, that was the first such decline in three quarters.

Interestingly, in terms of real total compensation, the current recovery has been a winner for manufacturing workers to an even greater extent than for all private sector workers. Combined constant dollar employer costs for wages, salaries, and benefits have risen by 4.72 percent – compared with a 1.99 percent advance during the previous recovery. (RealityChek regulars will note that these results contrast strikingly with those for wages alone, where manufacturing has been a major laggard. One reason is surely manufacturing’s relatively high unionization rate – which typically results in better benefits won and kept.)

If the Federal Reserve decides today to raise the federal funds rate it controls directly, or even if it simply stays determined to remains on a tightening path, it would signal its confidence that the American labor market remains on the mend following devastating losses during the last recession. Any doubts the central bank voices about its current strategy might indicate that it’s genuinely worried about the new ECI statistics – and that U.S. workers should be, too.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Links Between Low U.S. Pay and Low U.S. Productivity Growth

Tags

compensation, construction, finance, government, healthcare, manufacturing, productivity growth, restaurants, retail, services, {What's Left of) Our Economy

It’s long been clear to me that one big reason that Americans give lousy grades to the current economic recovery is that it’s been dominated by employment gains in lousy jobs. So it was great late last week to see strong confirmation provided by the Financial Times‘ Matthew Klein – who in the process showed that the problem has much deeper roots than my work has suggested. Klein also makes clear that this discouraging job creation pattern deserves much blame for lagging American productivity growth – which is crucial for the sustainable improvement in the nation’s living standards.

In a September 8 post, Klein demonstrated that since 2000, 94 percent of the net new jobs created by the U.S. economy came in education, healthcare, social assistance, bars, restaurants, and retail stores. When you weight these industries by their sizes, you find that their hourly pay has averaged 30 percent lower than in the rest of the economy – as per this chart he provides:

But the low-pay story hardly stops there. To add insult to injury, since jobs in retail, restaurants and bars typically involve shorter hours than in other sectors, weekly pay in these parts of the economy is fully 40 percent lower than in other industries. And these low-pay industries have been become such important American job creators that their relative growth has depressed the entire workforce’s weekly pay by three percent since 2000.

Further, in case you’re wondering, the employment trends have accelerated during the current recovery.

Even worse for the U.S. economy, especially over the longer term, the sectors producing all these lousy jobs have been sectors with big productivity problems. According to Klein, 96 percent of the net new jobs created in America since 1990 have come in industries known for low productivity (like construction, retail, and bars) or where low productivity is simply suspected, but understandably so, since they don’t feature much competition. (Healthcare, education, government, and finance fall into this category).

And of course, this evidence demonstrates the converse proposition, too – job creation has lagged during both these periods (and nosedived since 1990) in manufacturing, historically the economy’s productivity growth leader. And since it rebounded strongly after a recessionary crash dive, manufacturing output has stagnated at best.

As I’ve written, productivity is the subject economists generally regard as the most difficult to study, especially because it’s so hard to measure in services (which comprise most of the economy on a standstill basis), and especially when those services and their development are based on emerging technologies.

But one aspect of the productivity growth slump does seem to be rendered much less mysterious by Klein’s analysis: When an economy lets so much of its most productive sector stagnate at best, that’s sure not going to help its productivity.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: The Wage Inflation Story is Getting More Complicated

Tags

compensation, ECI, Employment Cost Index, inflation, Labor Department, minimum wage, pay, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Last week more evidence came in concerning claims that America is undergoing or verging on a new round of dangerous wage inflation (or any wage inflation), and the government has just provided a special bonus! The good people at the Labor Department, which tracks these trends, recently informed me that it not only keeps figures on overall compensation (the Employment Cost Index, or ECI), but that it also adjusts these numbers for inflation. So it’s possible to get a better fix on whether pay is keeping up with or trailing price changes in the rest of the economy – and also on how U.S. compensation nowadays has been performing in historical perspective.

First, the pre-inflation results from the latest ECI – which covers the second quarter of this year. For all private sector workers (whose pay is set largely by market forces, not government decisions), wages, salaries, and benefits combined increased by 2.35 percent over the second quarter of 2015. That’s better than the 1.79 percent year-on-year rise for the first quarter, and than the 1.90 percent improvement registered between the second quarters of 2014 and 2015. In fact, it’s the best year-on-year gain during the current recovery.

The trouble is, the current recovery is still a low bar. Annual increases dwarfing that 2.35 percent were common beforehand, and going back to 2001 (when the ECI was created). In fact, during the seven years of expansion covered by these latest ECI data, employment costs have risen by 15.16 percent total. That’s still well behind the 21.71 percent total increase during the previous recovery – which lasted only six years, and which is not widely viewed as a Golden Age for employees.  

Further, we shouldn’t forget about the impact of the latest burst of state and local level minimum wage hikes. However overdue you think they are or aren’t, it’s important to recognize that they have nothing to do with the underlying strength or weakness of labor markets.

When you adjust for inflation, however, a more complicated story emerges. On the one hand, over the last two or so years, there’s definitely been some overall compensation acceleration. After going nowhere for most of the current recovery, the real ECI rose by 1.50 percent year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2014, and by 2.70 percent in the first quarter of 2015 (when, to be sure, many of these minimum wage hikes kicked in).

Since then, although the annual rates of increase have slowed markedly, they’re still much better than during the recovery’s early phase. The big question they raise going forward is whether they can stay above one percent, especially since the economy’s growth is slowing markedly.

Over a longer period of time, the current recovery’s real ECI performance looks better historically speaking, but not by a wide margin. During its seven data years, overall compensation is up a total of 3.10 percent. The figure for the previous (six-year) expansion? 2.36 percent.

Moreover, during the 1980s expansion, which lasted slightly longer than seven years, the real ECI advanced by 4.25 percent. During the 1990s recovery, which ran just under a decade, the real ECI was up 7.61 percent. In other words, their annual average gains were both considerably better than those of the current expansion.  (The data for these previous expansions is found in a separate Labor Department report.)

So here’s one way to think about wage inflation: If your working memories or knowledge of the U.S. economy don’t go back past Y2K, you might legitimately be concerned. If you’re aware of the nation before this century, not nearly so much.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: New Data (Further) Deflate Wage Inflation Claims

Tags

benefits, compensation, ECI, Employment Cost Index, Jobs, salaries, wage inflation, wages, {What's Left of) Our Economy

I know that most mainstream economists are going to look at the latest figures on overall pay for American workers and keep claiming that the United States is experiencing or about to experience meaningful wage inflation. I just don’t know how they’re going to keep doing it in a way that convinces any fair-minded observers.

The data come from the Labor Department’s Employment Cost Index (ECI) and, to review, they’re the numbers that include both salaries and benefits as well as wages. Their two drawbacks are (1) they’re not adjusted for inflation; and (2) they’re issued quarterly, not monthly like the more closely followed wage statistics, so they’re not quite as timely.

Yet thanks to a (regular) quirk in the calendar, since we’re still in April, this newest ECI is timelier than usual. For it covers the first quarter of this year, which ended in March. And what it reports is that the year-on-year change in overall American workers total compensation – 1.79 percent – was not only much lower than that for first quarter, 2014-first quarter, 2015. The change, a drop of 34.91 percent from that previous 2.75 percent annual increase, also was the biggest such falloff by far since this trend began to be tracked in 2001. For good measure, the latest year-on-year change was the third weakest in absolute terms since then.

Matters don’t look any better when the current economic recovery is compared with its predecessor – the kind of analysis that produces the best (apples-to-apples) perspective. During the six-year economic expansion of the 2000s – which was largely fueled by bubbly borrowing and spending – the ECI rose by a total of 21.71 percent. During the current expansion, which has just become slightly longer, ECI is up 14.52 percent.

So it still seems perfectly justified to use “wages” and “inflation” in the same conversation. But putting them in the same (serious) sentence continues to get more difficult.