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Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth
- sleepyguy 1y agohttp://archive.today/BxREt http://archive.today/BxREt
- shmerl 1y ago> The president wants his own people there so that, when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable He wants people there to be his version of Minitrue, providing the numbers he wants to see, not the real ones: Reporting unworkers doubleplusun-good, rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling.
- koolba 1y agoAlternatively, he wants someone at the top who will create an organization that does not have to repeatedly restate massively incorrect numbers.
- shmerl 1y agoOr rather not mention them at all. He'd rather not bring attention to the topic to begin with.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoNah, if the numbers make him look great he'd be all over it.
- magic_man 1y agoThe numbers get better as they get more data.
- mh- 1y agoWhy not wait to release them until enough data has come in that it's settled? Serious question, what's the downside?
- altcognito 1y agoBecause the market values the early results and has an adult understanding of what the numbers mean.
- csb6 1y agoBecause the law requires them to release reports on certain dates, so they do so and then make corrections as more data comes in.
- mh- 1y agoThanks.
- kergonath 1y agoIt’s never settled as the data is never perfectly accurate or exhaustive. We just have to do with the caveats and understand that perfection does not exist, even if you have more data than you can handle. That’s what error bars, uncertainty analysis, and confidence intervals are for.
- keeda 1y agoSuch an organization cannot exist. These agencies are always balancing two opposing forces, timeliness and accuracy. Data collection is inherently delayed (e.g. a lot of it is from surveys that businesses complete at their own speed, or from reports that each state/agency submits on their own timeline.) So collection for a given quarter typically completes long after the quarter is over, and then it takes some time to crunch those numbers. So if you want early data it will inherently be of limited accuracy because that involves a lot of extrapolation with whatever incomplete data has been collected by that time. If you want accurate data you will have to wait for it because that data takes longer to be collected. You do want both because you need to make timely decisions, since most times the early numbers don't get revised by much, but you also want to course-correct when later, better data gives a different signal. Agencies like the BLS publish their methodologies in great detail. Big revisions have always been happening, only they are getting more attention these days because of the heavy politicization.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoThey shouldn’t announce until it’s accurate then?
- PieTime 1y agoUnless they are accurate most of the time, I would agree with this.
- keeda 1y agoThat's where the timeliness versus accuracy trade-off comes in. There is significant value in having an early signal to act on, especially as long as there is awareness of its limitations. And as I mentioned, this data does come with very clearly documented caveats and methodologies so that users can make informed decisions.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 1y agoNormally they're accurate enough, and the revisions/refinements are small. The initial estimates haven't been accurate recently, because many workers have been completely dropping out of the economy because they're afraid of immigration raids. Information about these workers is just harder to gather and takes longer to verify.
- altcognito 1y agoHow massively incorrect are the numbers in comparison to previous years? Was it anything unusual? Here, take a look for yourself: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2024 https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2024 If this is an understood part of the process, why is it such a problem now? Name some organizations that have "fire employees until we get success". Does that create a culture that prizes success, or just encourage employees to hide failure?
- EndsOfnversion 1y agoI think you understand how labor statistics work about as well as Trump.
- topspin 1y ago[flagged]
- shmerl 1y agoYeah, tin party soldier never questions anything.
- topspin 1y agoAlso, whataboutery.
- esseph 1y agoIt IS THE GOVERNMENT
- scarface_74 1y agoThe President just fired the person in charge of reporting jobs numbers because he didn’t like the report. Logically what do you think is about to happen?
- hyperadvanced 1y agoOn this topic- last year it was somewhat common for R politicians to criticize the D regime for the “report high, revise low” strategy - if anything, I guess, this firing has been telegraphed. Anyway, those people were also called conspiracy theorists and politically motivated. There’s clearly a conflict of interest between the facts and what is politically expedient on all sides of the political system in the USA. I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy. I doubt Trump has that goal in mind necessarily, laudable as it might be.
- tbrownaw 1y ago> I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy. This sounds like a call for it to be biased low? I'd prefer zero net bias - overstate and understate equally often - and as little error as possible. (Also, I'd like a pet unicorn for the munchkin.) The problem seems to be around the preliminary numbers and how widely they get reported. Maybe this is a case where excessive transparency and reporting partial data that's known to be inaccurate is negatively useful? Or maybe there could be some way to get people to accept that it's known to be wrong, and only useful if you have the chops to account for that wrongness in whatever you're using it for? But humans in general seem to mostly be allergic to not knowing things, so... Maybe the wrongness is predictable enough to model and account for, but publishing "expected correction" numbers along with the preliminary numbers would be extremely un-conservative in that doing that is speaking with your own voice rather than just collecting and reporting data.
- fluxkernel 1y agoPoorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.
- cowcity 1y agoOr related to capital, politics, etc.
- kennyloginz 1y agoThank you for saying this.
- monero-xmr 1y ago[flagged]
- reliabilityguy 1y agoWouldn’t the deportations increase the demand for low-paying jobs resulting in increasing salaries?
- monero-xmr 1y agoUhhh yes precisely. That helps the poor and hurts Wall Street
- hvb2 1y agoI genuinely wonder what you've done over the last few years. Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy
- reliabilityguy 1y ago> Rising salaries will lead to inflation. Expecting anything else is fantasy No. Riding salaries do not lead to inflation by themselves. What leads to inflation is the increase in money circulating on the market. In other words: printing money leads to inflation.
- hellgas00 1y ago"people earning roughly less than $806 a week — slowed to an annual rate of 3.7 per cent in June, down from a peak of 7.5 per cent in late 2022" With inflation dropping from 9.1% in June 2022 to 2.7% in June 2025, real wages for these low earners are now growing for the first time in years. The Financial Times failure to mention this context makes me question their motives.
- lumost 1y agoThis is probably cold comfort to a population looking at housing prices rising at 3.7% in 2025 per realtor.com.
- mnhnthrow34 1y agoIt doesn't change the "Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth" premise of the article, I don't see any hidden motive needed to explain this.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago"The wage growth trend means the lowest paid are now more likely to find themselves among the 40 per cent of US workers whose salaries are not keeping pace with inflation…" They do talk about inflation in the article.
- hellgas00 1y agoThey are not more likely to find themselves among the 40% of workers who's salaries are lagging inflation, they are more likely to be among the 60% who's salaries are outpacing inflation. The FT is being disingenuous.
- soganess 1y agoWage 'growth' after 2+ years of real wage decline (vs stagnation) is the coldest comfort to folks categorized as 'low earner'. Anyone ignoring that make me question their motives
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> real wages for these low earners are now growing for the first time in years This is total crap [1][2]. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M [2] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
- deadbabe 1y agoThere is just no advantage to being poor in America.
- zeroCalories 1y ago[flagged]
- alvah 1y agoWhy should there be an advantage to being poor?
- t43562 1y ago...because if there isn't then your democracy will turn into an oligarchy. The advantage needs to be somewhat against the richest and for the poorest if you're going to protect that.
- Rygian 1y agos/will turn/has turned/
- keiferski 1y agoPresumably you might want to give the poor a systemic advantage over the rich in order to balance the system and make it more democratic. Otherwise the rich will have more influence.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- RiverCrochet 1y agoGod created all humans equal in His image. Therefore when humans impose disadvantages on other humans just because they are poor, they go against God.
- rr808 1y ago> Pay for the top 25 per cent of workers is up by 4.7 per cent in the year to June Wait what? Anyone here getting 4.7% pay rises?
- hiddencost 1y agoGot an offer from a competitor, used it to negotiate a 20% raise.
- galleywest200 1y agoFairly certain the OP was talking about an annual "cost of living" adjustment, and not job searching for a better offer.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- CGamesPlay 1y agoFairly certain the quoted statistic was talking about total results, not people who stayed at the same job.
- tczMUFlmoNk 1y ago6% last year here.
- Yeul 1y agoOfcourse. That's what unions do. It's also why inflation is so damn nefarious because unions ALWAYS negotiate a pay rise to match it. Which as you can imagine gets very ugly fast.
- pindab0ter 1y agoThe wage-price spiral is heavily criticised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage%E2%80%93price_spiral#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage%E2%80%93price_spiral#Crit...
- user9999999999 1y agothe min wage is long overdue, its should be somewhere near $25/hr this is how you 'tax' billionaires
- agent_turtle 1y agoI got my first job as a grocer in 2010 which paid a minimum wage of $7.25/hr. That was 15 years ago and the minimum wage is still $7.25/hr.
- xienze 1y agoBut is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days? Might want to check what the grocery store you worked at in 2010 is really paying these days. I’d bet good money it’s significantly more than $7.25/hour.
- TimorousBestie 1y agohttps://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-people-are-earning-725-hour/ https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-... 869k workers. The size of a country larger than Luxembourg.
- xienze 1y agoDoesn't the fact that 98.9% of all workers earn more than the minimum wage kinda highlight that it's really not necessary for the federal government to increase it? Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance to actually _find_ workers who'll accept the minimum wage, hence the fact that hardly anyone is paying it.
- TimorousBestie 1y ago> But is anyone _actually_ getting paid the minimum wage these days? Yes. > Clearly it's nearly impossible except in limited circumstance No, you exaggerate. It’s a large number of people. I wouldn’t say it’s nearly impossible to find someone from Indianapolis (pop. 879k, 2024 est.), and the number of Americans is much larger than the number of working Americans.
- yalogin 1y agoWhat slowing wage growth? For the poorest the wages have essentially not increased for a long time right? It hasn’t even kept up with inflation. The recent bill actually makes it much worse.
- roywiggins 1y agoAs far as I can tell, over the last few years at least, that's mostly not true: wages outpaced inflation, and it outpaced inflation more for lower-income workers than higher. > In stark contrast to prior decades, low-wage workers experienced dramatically fast real wage growth between 2019 and 2023 https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ ("real wages" are wages adjusted for inflation)
- silisili 1y agoI'm obviously not an expert, but assumed the same thing. I watched a fast food joint near me go from 9/hr to 21/hr in just a few years. Maybe that was just pandemic pricing, I don't know. But getting >2x salary in such short order is outpacing pretty much everyone else, percentage wise.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoThis probably means that those wages were being suppressed hard for years and they finally weren't able to hire people at that wage anymore
- silisili 1y agoYou're probably right, but it ultimately leads to wage compression which is for most of the middle class a disaster. You don't have to look far to see everyday people complaining about the price of a burger or movie ticket. IMHO, it doesn't "lift all boats", it pulls down the middle and upper middle classes. Yeah, the lower wage jobs made more money, but they didn't gain much if anything in affordability, since all of the necessities are produced by people also demanding more money.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoWorks if/when archive.today is blocked No Javascript required x=https://www.ft.com/content/cfb77a53-fef8-4382-b102-c217e0aa4b25 echo url=$x|curl -K/dev/stdin -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Java) outbrain" > 1.htm firefox ./1.htm
- EcommerceFlow 1y ago[flagged]
- aaomidi 1y ago20 million? You think the US population had an additional 20 million population growth? And that we just absorbed that? That’s probably breaking a record or two. Got any non Trump sources to back that up?
- agent_turtle 1y agoCurrent unemployment is a very low 4%, which completely contradicts your baseless theory.
- roywiggins 1y agoAs far as I can tell, the poorest workers' real wages grew, and grew faster than the median workers', on a relative basis, from 2019-2023: https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/ https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
- keeda 1y agoYes, the simplistic "immigrants are competion" narratives always disregard the fact that immigrants also contribute to the economy and uplift it. For instance, there is a credible theory that the "immigration crisis" was instrumental in managing the inflation crisis: https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy-election-labor-market/ https://fortune.com/2024/04/12/immigration-inflation-economy...
- digitaltrees 1y agoWe could have a billion Americans and keep employing them productively. Immigration has been America’s superpower for 150 years. The real problem is monopoly firms that suppress wages of workers and innovation at the same time. The same monopolies that outsourced our manufacturing. All of which started with deregulation and tightening of immigration controls. So you’re wrong.
- einrealist 1y agoThat's the myth of Trickle-down economics in action.
- rester324 1y agoThe same thing happens in other countries too BTW. Prime example is Japan, where prime minister Abe promoted this nice lie for many long years
- Yeul 1y agoCuriously in the Netherlands poverty has gone down. But that's because the government has a pretty solid Robin Hood system going on: take from the rich give to the poor. The amount of wealth that is redistributed is frankly insane.
- okwhateverdude 1y agoI'm generally in favor. My taxes provide an amazing experience here. I have never seen the abject poverty that I've seen in other places (such as the US) here in NL. Great infrastructure, labor laws, culture and arts, etc. I worry less about break-ins and theft. All-in-all, the least worst place to live, by far.
- quantified 1y agoIf we in the USA got our money's worth from taxes, we feel rich. But we truly don't.
- magentaworker 1y agoYou got it, that huge army is not free, that militarized police is not free, the CIA is not free, FBI, NSA, and all that huge security related organizations that nobody else in the world has except maybe Israel and not at the same scale.
- PeterStuer 1y agoWelcome to modern slavery. You wanted rights and strive for legal orgnization to improve your working conditions and pay? So we'll replace you with people that have no rights, have ruthless gangs supply and control them, and maybe, we will get you some handouts if you do not upset the new applecart.
- potato3732842 1y agoThe prevailing HN wisdom from, IDK 2010 or before, to 2020something was that inflation was good for the poors because their debt went away (laughable when considering interest rates on a lot of that debt but still). Where are those people now? Why are they not all over these comments posting links rebutting the article? Or if they no longer exist what made them change their minds?
- rsanek 1y agoHow do you measure prevailing wisdom? Is there some sort of data we can look at?
- thuridas 1y agoThe tax cuts for the rich will also probably mean that a lot of this money is going to buy real state as an investment rising the house prices.
- jalapenos 1y agoThe immigration crackdown and the tariffs will also mean effective reduced supply of foreign labor, and since their labor is what poor people sell, it will cause upward pressure on their earnings.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoThe tariff will cause, is causing in fact, increased prices. This will have a negative effect on their earnings.
- pseudocomposer 1y agoCould you please define what you mean by “earnings” in this context?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y agoI meant the buying power of their wages.
- stvltvs 1y agoIn the hospitality sector, tariffs (and harassment of tourists at the border) are reducing earnings by reducing tourism.
- jmpman 1y agoIsn’t this fundamental down to landlords being able to extract all excess pay from the lowest paid workers? Minimum wage increases, simply get passed on to the landlord on higher rents.
- RickJWagner 1y agoThis article ignores the delta between wage growth and inflation. Yes, wage growth was higher in 2022. But inflation was raging then. Today’s environment is actually better for low wage earners ( but far from ideal ).
- more_corn 1y agoAnd the higher prices caused by tariffs which amount to a tax on imported goods. The things everyone buys are more expensive due to the president’s antics. And doing business is more expensive so businesses can’t afford to spend it on hiring and wage growth.