Workers in the Middle Have Stagnated During the Entire Recovery

Membership Ticker

You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you—especially at a moment like this. That's really it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a much shorter than normal three-week window, by November 5, so we can keep right on doing it. Please pitch in early to help us get there.

$250,000

You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

Every month, when I post the latest jobs numbers, I also mention the wages of production and nonsupervisory workers. I do this because I think it’s a good rough measure of how well economic growth is helping the working and middle classes, not just the upper middle class of lawyers and programmers. But I don’t normally put this in any larger context, so here’s the wage growth of production and nonsupervisory workers during the past seven years of the recovery, adjusted for inflation:

P&NS workers took a big hit in 2011, made up for it with good wage growth in 2015, and have seen very modest growth since then. Over the past seven years this adds up to cumulative real wage growth of 3.9 percent. That’s about 0.6 percent per year.

This is better than going down, of course, but not much better. We’ve had a long, steady recovery since the Great Recession, but workers in the middle mostly continue to stagnate.