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Businesses The Almighty Buck United States

Wage Growth Slows Across the Country (axios.com) 173

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Wages in the United States are going up, but their growth is shrinking, says Glassdoor chief economist Andrew Chamberlain. Wages should be rising an average of 3%-4% given the tightness of the job market, Chamberlain says. According to official data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, wage growth was a lower 2.6% in February. Glassdoor data -- based on a survey of 100,000 salaries posted by the jobs site every month -- show even lower growth, shrinking to just 1% last month.
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Wage Growth Slows Across the Country More

Wage Growth Slows Across the Country

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  • H1B Program a success (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @01:33PM (#56393495)
    If wages are stagnating or dropping, then the H1B program is doing exactly what it was designed to: keep IT wages low. After all we can't expect our poor corporate overlords to simply pay us more because they have been reaping record profits. Everyone knows that the investor class and C-suite are the only ones that deserve any of the pie. If you want a raise, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and start your own multi-billion-dollar international corporation!

    • Not just the H1-B Program (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @02:43PM (#56393931)
      FedEx was about to open a new distribution center in Indiana but they skipped it because they'd increased productivity so much at their existing centers they didn't need it. We've become massively more productive [google.com].

      Also, anyone else find it telling that the phrase used to describe succeeding without help describes a physically impossible event? It's like a bad joke everybody ran with.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      According to the same source as TFA, H1B workers don't depress native wages. In fact, they are on average paid slightly above market rate.

      https://www.glassdoor.com/rese... [glassdoor.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by djinn6 ( 1868030 )

        According to the same source as TFA, H1B workers don't depress native wages. In fact, they are on average paid slightly above market rate.

        https://www.glassdoor.com/rese... [glassdoor.com]

        They certainly do depress wages for tech jobs, as your own citation states:

        By contrast, there are many examples of jobs where H1B workers usually earn less than U.S. workers — despite legal requirements that employers pay “prevailing wages” to H1B workers. Four examples of these types of jobs are shown in the table below: data scientist, financial analyst, programmer analyst, and software engineer. In these cases, H1B workers usually earn less than otherwise similar U.S. workers. For example, among software engineers, H1B workers earned less than or equal to U.S. workers in every city we examined, ranging from equal median salaries in Seattle to -17 percent less in Chicago. Similarly, H1B salaries for programmer analysts were lower in nine of the 10 cities we examined, ranging from -1 percent in Atlanta to -28 percent in Chicago and Washington, D.C. (H1B pay for programmer analysts was 7 percent higher in one city: Philadelphia).

    • Everyone knows that the investor class and C-suite are the only ones that deserve any of the pie. If you want a raise, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and start your own multi-billion-dollar international corporation!

      And if you ever hear a C-suit suit at your company enthuse about the book _Crossing the Chasm_, circulate your resume immediately!

      That is EXACTLY what it prescribes. right at the end of one of the later chapters, and the key to both its success as a book and the crashing of the companies wh

  • Take your lumps for Trump (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GameboyRMH ( 1153867 ) <gameboyrmh&gmail,com> on Friday April 06, 2018 @01:35PM (#56393505) Journal

    Like the stock market losses due to recent attempts to initiate a trade war and the wealth transfers to the 1% through tax "reform," this downturn is just part of Making America Great Again, and you should accept your losses with pride for the glory of the Dear Leader. Things will get better...real soon...any day now...

    • Here is a graph of historical US wage growth https://tradingeconomics.com/u... [tradingeconomics.com]

      Based on the 5 year chart, wage increases steadily dropped from 2014 until around November 2017, when increases bottomed out at close to zero. Since the election, wages have recovered nicely. There are dips and peaks in the chart, but the current trend is very encouraging.

      • Sorry, I meant November 2016 - not 2017. Wages have been increasing nicely since around Nov 2016.

      • That's an interesting interpretation. To me it looks like wage growth ranges from 4~6% from 2014 to 2016 before it begins to drop. It takes 2 big falls, one in early 2016 and one in late 2016, before it begins to recover. It eventually recovers to about 5% before beginning the drop mentioned in TFS.

        If you look at the 10 year chart, wage growth generally stays in the range of 2~6% from mid 2010 to late 2016. So the current trend is still well within that range, although I don't see how a drop toward what app

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by TheSync ( 5291 )

        What you really need to look at is real compensation per hour [stlouisfed.org] because of all the non-wage compensation going on (health insurance, etc.). It is pretty flat since 2015.

        The civillian labor force [stlouisfed.org] flatlined from 2008-2012, then start to a weak climb. Labor force participation rate [stlouisfed.org] only stopped falling in 2015 (the same time that total compensation flatlined).

        My thought is that despite the low and flatlining unemployment rate, there are still people who are being sucked back into the labor force by availabilit

    • Stop abandoning the working class (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @02:50PM (#56393981)
      Trump is a consequence of abandoning the working class. People like Hilary Clinton (and a lot of /.ers) tell guys in their 30s and 40s they need to retrain for skills they couldn't learn in their 20s with loans they can't afford and no money coming in to support themselves let alone the families they had before their jobs were automated/outsourced/replaced with an H1-B.

      I've noticed a trend where everybody's in support of the government stepping in to help out until it's somebody else. Then it becomes teh Socialisms. This needs to stop. The working class needs solidarity. We need to stop pretending we can make it on our own and that there's no class warfare going on. We're getting picked apart here. Fighting among ourselves for scraps while the ruling class laughs in our face.

      Policy wise this means:
      • Medicare for all
      • End the wars
      • New New Deal
      • Fix our infrastructure
      • College for everyone

      Nobody left behind. Everyone gets cared for and we stop complaining about having to pay for the occasional lazy surfer dude who doesn't work much or at all.

      • +1

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dryeo ( 100693 )

        College for everyone

        Shouldn't that be Collage for those that can pass the entrance exams and technological school for any who wants it? Lots of people like my brother where a collage education would have helped him less then the 2 years he spent learning how to be a glazier did. Plumbers, electricians, welders etc are usually in demand, especially for fixing the infrastructure, the trades pay decently and for some are a better career path then collage.

        • entrance exams are fine, but we're just splitting hairs. The point is to do away with tuition at public universities.

          Vocational Schools are fine as well, but that can be handled by the community colleges. What I don't want to see are a bunch of ITT tech style "schools" that drain money from the public coffers in exchange for not teaching. That's easy enough to avoid. Just fund the Community College's vocational programs.

          But again, we're getting into the weeds here. The point is that if people want to

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dryeo ( 100693 )

            It's not just splitting hairs, but rather avoiding the scenario where you need a collage degree to serve coffee at Starbucks. Even without tuition, going to university can be expensive, especially if you have to go any distance, and ideally a university education should only be required in cases where it is actually a requirement.

            Are 'ITT tech style "schools"' actually a problem where you are? Here (BC) the vocational/technology schools all seem to be run by the government. Though I do admit I haven't looke

        • Shouldn't that be Collage for those that can pass the entrance exams and technological school for any who wants it? Lots of people like my brother where a collage education would have helped him less then the 2 years he spent learning how to be a glazier did. Plumbers, electricians, welders etc are usually in demand, especially for fixing the infrastructure, the trades pay decently and for some are a better career path then collage.

          I completely agree with you. I'd mod you up if I had points. Not everyone needs to go to College to go into the various trades that pay very well.

          • the reason you want everybody to go to college is to get the kind of well rounded education that results in an informed electorate with critical thinking skills. Despite what you might think you _can_ teach critical thinking. It's best done in the humanities, since you can teach almost anyone to read Shakespear with enough effort but there are limits on how much math you can teach (around the time you get past Trig).

            As for why you want a well educated populace, well they're much less likely to make stup

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Most people don't need college. I have a BS and MA degrees. My current, self-employed job required no college education, only a few months reading books and listening to podcasts on the subject. I'm on track to retire by 50. If I didn't have 60k left in student loans, I'd be able to retire in my early 40s (I'm 31 now). The friends I have who stayed at their programming jobs plan to retire at retirement age. They're all making more money (80-95k range) than me, yet I'm saving over double what they are.

  • Where's all that tax cut money (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mark_reh ( 2015546 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @02:20PM (#56393787) Journal

    that the rich are supposed to be using to pay Americans higher wages?

    • Re:Where's all that tax cut money (Score:5, Informative)

      by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @02:26PM (#56393823)

      Caymens, Switzerland, Panama, [offshore destination of choice]. Oh, and for some of them it's a down payment on a bigger yacht.

      • that the rich are supposed to be using to pay Americans higher wages?

        Caymens, Switzerland, Panama, [offshore destination of choice]. Oh, and for some of them it's a down payment on a bigger yacht.

        Is that down payment being paid to other rich who are handcrafting yachts out of gold bars and stock certificates? If the grandparent post is dividing the population into "rich" and "Americans", where is the dividing line?

        I would have thought that buying a yacht qualifies as "rich" paying wages to "not rich", via a yacht building company whose owner might be either.

        Maybe the grandparent expects the "rich" should literally toss bundles of cash at random. It seems to me that creating luxury items, and especia

        • I didn't realize that the only input to a yacht was manual labor! It's not like it takes expensive materials, involves payments for IP, uses automated machinery (ala capital) or anything else. Boat creation is not a heavy job creator.

          Maybe the grandparent expects the "rich" should literally toss bundles of cash at random.

          I don't expect the rich to voluntarily do that, no. Whether it makes sense to force them to is a different question.

          If the "rich" simply stash cash offshore and never buy anything with i

          • it takes expensive materials, involves payments for IP, uses automated machinery

            You've just dramatically increased support for my point. It's not just a wealthy yacht maker getting rich off the sale of that yacht because that yacht maker has lots of suppliers. Those suppliers employ miners, refiners, forgers, skilled craftsmen for the expensive materials (hint, the reason they're "expensive" materials is that they involve a lot of labor to create. Those "payments for IP" go to companies that employ designers, lawyers, salespeople, receptionists, security guards, cafeteria workers, and

    • Re:Where's all that tax cut money (Score:5, Insightful)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @03:02PM (#56394091) Homepage

      Lots of companies gave one-time bonuses to employees, while themselves getting a year-after-year benefit. They probably see this as a bribe to employees to convince them that the tax cuts are what they want too.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Most of them SAID they were giving bonuses but only a small handful actually have. Plenty of those bonuses that did get paid out were pre-negotiated and actually had jack schitt to do with the tax cuts.

  • so 2.6% is less than 3% so things are terrible, even as unemployment falls? and illegals are kicked out?

    yeah, this is whining

  • To say "wage growth is shrinking" with the implication that "something is wrong" following behind is so misleading one would have to ask what was the real purpose of releasing such a statement?

    https://www.theatlas.com/chart... [theatlas.com]

    Wage growth (such as it is/was) is flatlining ... which is still shit-tons better than it's been since 2008 where it's basically been falling in constant dollars.

  • I know, I know; the solution is to open the borders even wider to people who will work for peanuts!

    That will raise wages, because reasons!

  • Averages - careful of assumptions (Score:3)

    by Catbeller ( 118204 ) on Friday April 06, 2018 @04:55PM (#56394883) Homepage

    Wages up 2.7%? Not that I can see. That is an *average*. The well-paid have rising salaries, the crap-paid wages are shrinking, the average being a bit up. You also have to factor in that the poorly-paid have rents that are rising way faster than their 8.50 up to 9.05 bucks an hour, just about everywhere now. Housing for the poor and merely cash-strapped ain't being built, and probably never will be.

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