Well, at least on the online version, that is.
Hourly Pay in U.S. Not Keeping Pace With Price Rises
By EDUARDO PORTER
Published: July 18, 2004The amount of money workers receive in their paychecks is failing to keep up with inflation. Though wages should recover if businesses continue to hire, three years of job losses have left a large worker surplus.
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Even though the economy has been adding hundreds of thousands of jobs almost every month this year, stagnant wages could put a dent in the prospects for economic growth, some economists say. If incomes continue to lag behind the increase in prices, it may hinder the ability of ordinary workers to spend money at a healthy clip, undermining one of the pillars of the expansion so far.
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On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that hourly earnings of production workers - nonmanagement workers ranging from nurses and teachers to hamburger flippers and assembly-line workers - fell 1.1 percent in June, after accounting for inflation. The June drop, the steepest decline since the depths of recession in mid-1991, came after a 0.8 percent fall in real hourly earnings in May.
Despite my keen interest in pocketbook economics, I'm not a professional. The closest I come is that my specialty in my field, archaeology, is wampum, used for a few decades in early American colonization as a monetary unit. And while my training may give me a bit of an edge over the average Joe in archival digging, there is no reason that mainstream journalists should have had any problem locating data released every month, in black and white, in the monthly jobs report (Addenda B-3 and B-4.) I first noticed the trend over six months ago, despite working 60 hours a week (at a pitiful wage, I might add):
Another issue I've been itching to talk about has been the stagnating non-exempt hourly rate, which once again, in November indicated that inflation is growing faster than worker bee earnings. From January to July 2003, non-exempt hourly earnings increased by 45 cents. Since July 2003, earnings have grown by a whopping 3 cents. Yet in the meantime, inflation, while not rampant, has still increased significantly more than wages.
The failure of the mainstream press to report such events irritates me to no end, as such laziness plays right into the hands of right-wing pundits who argue that all is well and good with our so-called recovery. While hundreds of thousands of jobs have been added in the past few months, we are still at an employment deficit not seen since the Great Depression, and the paychecks of newly re-employed worker bees are significantly lighter than before they joined the unemployment lines. Middle class Americans, who have seen their quarterly 401K reports make up much of the ground lost after the 2001 collapse of the markets and the equity in their homes (on the brink of a possible price bubble) skyrocket, are generally unaware of the pain felt by their peers on the lower rungs of the economic ladder.
Thus, when the SCLM fails to draw attention to the real costs of the Bush economic plan, consumer confidence rises. As consumer confidence heads up, so do Bush's poll numbers. When James Carville coined the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid," he wasn't bad-mouthing average Americans; the "stupids" were the media, who even back in 1992 often ignored the bread and butter issues voters ultimately depended on to determine how they pulled the lever, not the more sexy blather of "values" spoonfed to political journalists by agents of the Right.
I'm glad that the NYTimes has finally reassigned their economics desk from their previous stint on fashion or Kobe or the Bush twins. It's just too bad they didn't think to do it months ago.
Posted by MB Williams at July 18, 2004 06:03 AM | TrackBack