U.S. Workers Are Seeing Strong Wage Gains

John Tatom

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: According to many recent press reports, the American worker faces a dismal picture of falling real wages, the purchasing power of worker compensation, and job opportunities, often linked to off-shoring or the availability of cheap foreign labor, especially in China. Real wages have shown strong growth in the past decade, reflecting unusually strong growth in productivity, especially in 2003-04. The outlook for real wages is mixed, however.. More likely than not, over the next couple of years real wage growth will fall short of its 2.9 percent pace of increase over the past two years, but will equal or exceed the 2.1 percent pace of real wage gain since 2000, which also is the pace of productivity growth registered over the past two years. Such a pace would be far in excess of the dismal 1973-97 record.

Keywords: Productivity and real wages; measures of wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-09-30
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Published in Research Buzz 8.2(2006): pp. 1-3

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