Recession slams workers' pay (US)

Feminists will still have to complain women earn less, how else can they get attention, they are like little babies always crying and whining! They are not Feminazi's Fascists for nothing, they have a ploy, plotting there next move.

Men's wages are falling faster than women's, Economic Policy Institute says

SAN FRANCISCO - Wage growth among middle- and low-income U.S. workers has been shaky, at best, for a decade, but in the last three years it collapsed, with wages growing at less than half the rate they had in the period right before the recession, and some workers' pay decreasing, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute.

Median weekly earnings for full-time workers 25 and older grew at a rate of 0.5% in the year ending in the second quarter, down from 1.3% in 2009, 3.4% in 2008 and 4.3% in 2007, according to the EPI report, which measured year-over-year changes in growth from second quarter to second quarter. The figures are not adjusted for inflation. EPI is a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that focuses on low- and middle-income workers.

Reuters

Men have lost more ground as U.S. wage growth has contracted than women, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

But some workers actually lost ground, with men's paychecks, in particular, hit hard. Men's median wages fell 1.3% in the year ending in the second quarter, down from a growth rate of 5.3% in the comparable period ending in mid-2008, the first year of the recession. Women's wage growth dropped to 3.7% from 5.2% over the same period. The data looked at adults 25 and older.
The median weekly wage for a man 25 or older was $861 in the second quarter. For a woman in that age group, the median wage was $704, according to EPI.
Men who didn't have a high-school diploma saw median wages drop 3.6%, but men with a bachelor's degree didn't fare much better, with a decline of 3.1%. Men with high-school diplomas had wage growth of zero, as did men with advanced degrees.
Women without a high-school diploma lost ground too, with median pay falling 2.6%, while wages for women with just a high-school diploma dropped 1.5%.
But women college graduates drew pay hikes. Those with a B.A. saw median wages grow 4.3%, and those with advanced degrees got a 0.8% pay boost.
EPI did not adjust wage-growth rates for inflation in part because inflation has been volatile since the recession started, mainly due to steeply fluctuating energy prices. Energy prices rose more than 19% in 2008's second quarter, compared with prices a year earlier, then fell 26% in the same period in 2009, then rose almost 12% in 2010, EPI said.
When adjusted for inflation, various measures of wage growth land in the zero-to-negative-1.4% range in 2010, EPI said. See the full EPI report.
"That's what we will see going forward, as we continue with persistent high unemployment," said Heidi Shierholz, a labor economist at EPI. "We will continue to see real [inflation-adjusted] wages just hovering around zero or negative."

Disconnect between productivity and income

But median income has been falling for a while, EPI said.

Double-dip avoidance

A growing number of commentators expect the current U.S. slowdown to translate into a double-dip recession. But if, as many of them believe, the U.S. is repeating Japan's so-called lost decade, a more likely situation involves stubbornly slow growth.

Even as workers' productivity grew 11% from 2002 through 2007, income was losing ground. The inflation-adjusted median income for working-age households dropped to $58,718 in 2007, down from $60,804 in 2000, according to EPI. Unlike measures of weekly wages, income includes investment income and other sources.
Economic models tend to assume that rising productivity will lead to rising wages, Shierholz said. The assumption, she said, has been that "productivity -- that's the amount of goods and services the average worker produces in an hour -- as that goes up, wages will rise in lockstep, so workers reap the gains of their increased productivity," she said.
But that had changed as far back as the mid-1970s, Shierholz said. "We started to see this break. Productivity kept rising, [but] wages really flattened off," she said. "Essentially it's an inequality story. You can talk about productivity as being a measure of the growth of the riches of the country. If it's not going to the typical worker ... it's going to the top."

Fast-growing jobs are low paid

Another problem for future prospects for pay growth: Of the five fastest-growing occupations between 2006 and 2009, four of them paid less than the median wage, according to a separate EPI analysis.
Food preparers and servers, home health aides, warehouse stock clerks, medical assistants and registered nurses find themselves in the five fastest-growing occupations, according to EPI's analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of those, though, only registered nurses make more than $15.95 an hour, which was the median wage in May 2009. The median wage for a registered nurse is $30.65 an hour.
Food prep and serving jobs pay a median $8.28 per hour, home health aides collect $9.85 an hour, warehouse stock clerks earn $10.08 an hour, and medical assistants $13.77 per hour.
For food-prep and food-service workers, the median wage of $8.28 per hour translates into an annual salary of $16,560, based on working a typical year of 2,000 hours.

Source: MW