Hourly Earnings for February 2021
The above table is courtesy of the BLS.
February 2021 Details
- Average hourly earnings rose from $28.51 to $30.01, an increase of $1.50 an hour.
- You only saw $0.38 of that because inflation-adjusted wages only rose from $11.02 to $11.40.
- Real average hourly earnings declined in the last two months.
- Hooray! In January your weekly pay rose. However you had to work more hours to get that because you lost money on a per hour basis.
- Boo. In February your weekly pay declined by a full percentage point because your real pay per hour declined and you also worked fewer hours on average.
Congratulations On Your 13 Cents!
I downloaded all the data and calculated how much more you are making today per hour, on average, inflation adjusted back to the beginning of the data series in 1964.
Since January 1973, real wages for production and supervisory workers rose by 13 cents per hour.
Curiosities
In nominal terms the average production and supervisory worker made $4.03 in 1973 which the BLS says was really worth $9.44.
This has to do with the inflation index date set to 1982-1984 at 100.
Anyway, spend your 13 cents per hour increase wisely because home price are not even in the CPI.
For discussion, please see Inflation Fears Recede After Another Tame CPI Report, Pause in the Storm?
Mish
Unions aren’t going to fix monetary policy. Sorry bub
Isn’t 1973 the year Joseph Robinette Biden was first elected girlyman?
Isn’t 1973 the year Joseph Robinette Biden was first elected to public office?
Isn’t 1973 when Joseph Robinette Biden was first elected to office?
There are several reasons for this. The biggest one is that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency which basically guarantees that the US will have structural trade deficits resulting in more imports and reducing the US manufacturing capacity. The second was that until Trump, Republicans felt any pushback against China (especially by Democrats) was anti-business. The logic behind Trump’s policies I don’t understand (and neither did he). The US should wean itself off of reserve currency status and aggressively defend itself against intellectual property theft by China. Where we are just out-competed by China we have to just work harder in the areas where we have a chance to compete. There are certain industries where it is unlikely that we can be competitive at least in the foreseeable future. There is a snowball’s chance in hell that this will happen.
How far have the real wages risen in China over the same period? That would be a good overlay to show where the capital has been going since Nixon.
This doesn’t go back as far, but I think it’s safe to assume wage growth in China has far surpassed that of the US.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/743563/china-average-yearly-wage-growth/#:~:text=As%20of%202019%2C%20the%20average,compared%20to%20the%20previous%20year.
Obamacare’s About to Get a Lot More Affordable. These Maps Show How.
For this year and next, the stimulus bill boosts subsidies for nearly all those buying their own coverage, making insurance free for more people and giving higher-income people discounts for the first time.
Under the stimulus bill passed by Congress this week and set to be signed by President Biden on Friday, nearly all those who buy their own insurance are eligible for a discount.
I’m convinced Obamacare was created so drug companies could sell their absurdly overpriced drugs to people who could otherwise not afford them. Only the super rich and insured can afford to get many ailments. There aren’t enough super rich, so they needed to insure a lot more people.
Great, insurance is free. Now what’s the co-pay, deductible and limits on what Obama-Care covers?
Well hey, that’s 13 cents more than back then, should be considered a form of hedonism like being able to afford a roof.
Averages for ALL workers include CEOs and executives.
Production workers do not include CEOs etc.
This is average earnings, but as people gain experience they get better, higher paying jobs. It’s highly unlikely that individual people have gained so little.
What about the value of non taxable benefits? I.e, health insurance premiums, IRA contributions, etc.
I also have a house full of tools and toys that are beyond the science fiction of 1973.
Jetpacks and flying cars are still annoyingly unaffordable though.
I won’t live that long, I don’t believe. Didn’t they used to call it “trickle down”? Ended up being more like “trickled on”. At least Stockman was taken to the woodshed for it.
Stockman was taken to the woodshed? How? By whom? I’d say he walked away scot free from a bunch of serious messes he made as a failed hedge fund manager.
I used to read him before he decided to put up a paywall. Not worth spending money to hear him make his doom predictions…….which he’s been doing now for what, ten years? Waste of time in my book.
Stockman will always be a hero in my eyes, but I agree, his economic forecasts aren’t worth a damn.
In a “trickle down” economy, why do you think the elite denigrate “all those pee-ons”
Free Trade and Economic Liberalism work! Just need a bit more time and you will see the benefits. Another thirty years should do it.
It’ll definitely do it for me.
Like with anything else, the standard of living rises and falls over time, in any particular area. Nothing stays the same. There is no preventing it from changing.
We don’t live in a linear world. Europe went from the Roman Empire into the Dark Ages. Industrial centers grew up in the U.S., aged and declined.
We all have our own self interests. We want to gain something and hold onto it forever. Farmers don’t want to lose a local market to foreign competition. They don’t want their prices to drop. They petition the government for tariffs. Big business tries to freeze out small new competitors.
Special interests aren’t going to allow free trade and economic liberalism to work, just as those too big to fail, aren’t allowed to. But who does a manipulated system benefit? How many does it work for? Free or manipulated, there is nothing that works for everyone, all the time, as it all moves in cycles. Every boom ends in a bust.
That’s okay, houses cost 10x more. We’ll all get rich selling real estate to each other!
Sell? The last thing I want to do is sell. lol.
I have agents cold-calling me nearly every day, now. Writing me fake hand-written letters telling they’re moving to town and need a place for their family. Right. They must think I’m pretty dumb.
Such silly tactics to try to shake loose some potential houses to flip or tear down.
I guess that decision I made to quit my job and go back to school in ’78 was a good one. I was knocking down seven bucks and change making aluminum castings for GE. . I’d probably be up to 8 by now.
But the workers sincerely thank you for doing this.
You report this data, yet you are so anti-union. So who is supposed to look out for the workers, market forces?
Workers are supposed to be looking out for themselves (ie bettering themselves to get better jobs/pay).
Unions are not a panacea and in fact make everything more expensive for everyone NOT in a union. For example if steelworkers are in a union and increase the price of steel by their demands then who pays for that? Not the business owner, but instead every consumer of steel which happens to be everyone else, especially low income workers that say flip burgers or are cashiers. Those people get killed by union wages raising costs.
And if your answer is ‘everyone should be in a union’ then that’s the same as ‘no one is in a union’ because everyone’s wages will be lock-step (ie all unions would end up negotiating same raises).
Supposed to… but the dumber ones will trample each other to lick the master’s feet. When enough adopt this strategy, workers looking out for themselves pits them against other workers.
As far as I know, no ideology has been devised that takes into account the irrational quirks of the human mind. They’re all built for some hypothetical ideal human that never existed.
So far, they’ve all failed except the current batch, and none of them are looking healthy….
So capital is free to organize, as in the formation of a corporation, but labor shouldn’t? If everyone was in a Union, then labor would garner a greater share of the profits as opposed to share holders (capital holders). But yeah, that’s the same as no-one being in a union…
BTW you can’t expect everyone to better themselves. How many engineers do you need to design a bridge as opposed to skilled labor to construct it? You still need laborers to do grunt work, so why not pay them a living wage and have them contribute to the economy instead of serving as debt serfs? Either that or we just need to eliminate the non-productive portion of the population, per COVID or some other more precise means.
You are correct that not everyone can/will better themselves. There will be winners and losers in life. No union or any other kind of arrangement will ever prevent that. And what’s the different between being a deft serf and a living wage. Both allow the person to live and eat. Everything else is just how well they get to do it (which is back to the original point of if you want to live better you need to improve yourself/work harder).
BTW, if everyone was in a union, we’d have communism. I thought it would be implicitly understood that’s what everyone in a union would mean. Is that how you’d like to live?
Amen to that. When the top 20% of Americans own 86% of the total US wealth, having labor unions should not have to be justified. Most of the anti-union noise is propaganda being spread by people at the bottom of pie against each other. The way it usually works, in other words.
Mish is anti-PUBLIC union. Note the enormous differences between a public and private union.
I am not a fan of government worker unions. No limits, there. It’s real easy to spend taxpayer dollars, as we are now witnessing with this covid relief bs.
The Fed.
(does this need /s?)