"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.
"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…"
It 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.
Wage '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
What 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.
As 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
I'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.
You'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.
Today, I'd agree. It felt like a dirty thing to even write.
Historically, the lower wage jobs were for kids or bored folk, who'd eventually move onto something better and higher wages.
Recently, the economy isn't great and people take what they can find. There's absolutely no shame in that. I know people in tech who were making low to mid 6 figures now doing retail. The jobs just aren't there, and I constantly fear I'll be in the same boat soon.
But that inevitably does lead to wage compression, which to be clear isn't the fault of the lower wage earners.
Activists love to use the Federal Minimum Wage, which has not increased in a long time (16 years), as their basis for that claim, ignoring how few workers are actually paid the Federal Minimum Wage. It's become a worthless metric for anything other than misleading arguments.
In addition to state and local governments setting their own minimums, the decline in young people and competition for workers in that sector from food delivery companies, has put wage pressure on fast food companies. Most wouldn't be able to open their doors if they tried to pay the Federal Minimum Wage. Had it been pegged to inflation, it would be $10.90/hour, which is less than what fast food workers are paid almost anywhere.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden was bashing Trump for crashing the economy. An economy, Wyden said (paraphrasing) idolized by the world.
Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
Takes $600k/yr now to have buying power of $200k/yr in the 1980s. Inflation in the US has been here for decades hidden as deflation of purchasing power.
> Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
I can't anymore, folks. Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires, increased the deficit by trillions, and kicked millions of people of medicaid. Meanwhile, Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs we've ever seen which affect the poorest the most.
> Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs
Tariffs incentivize domestic production. See the case of chicken tax and pickup trucks. While we do pay for tariffs now, later down the road we should not as more things would be made domestically. If you don’t do tariffs, there is no way to force producers to onshore.
The chicken tax encourages creative workarounds more than domestic production. Importing all the parts and putting them together in the US is production work, so fine. Importing chassis cab and putting a bed on in the US is silly, importing with seats discarded in the US is wasteful (Ford got dinged, but I don't think others did?)
Who's making small cargo vans domestically? Nobody. So they're all 25% more expensive, so you might as well buy a big cargo van when a small one would do.
Honestly, governments buy enough light trucks, that 'buy american' requirements would likely keep at least one company making them here.
There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.
> what is this reason?
I’m remodelling my deck. I had orders into a steel mill in Utah. Tariffs mean their steel inputs are pricer than competitors in Vietnam. So I switched the order. And I paid with a cheque—if I paid cash I could skip taxes altogether. That wasn’t a thing six months ago.
Meanwhile, software and services aren’t tariffed. Just goods. Guess whose cost of capital has sunk.
> There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.
You absolutely do once the math of tariffs makes your manufacturing abroad not competitive with onshored one. Will it apply for all categories of products? Probably not. However, it will definitely apply for many.
I am not sure I understood your reply about the reasons.
> absolutely do once the math of tariffs makes your manufacturing abroad not competitive with onshored one
If someone bet on e.g. our Japan tariffs three months ago, they lost money. (Nobody did. The types that take Trump at his word on tariffs aren’t making economically significant decisions.?
It absolutely is when the status quo would have increased taxes. That may not be a cut of current taxes, but in the longer timeframe it is absolutely a tax cut.
Bills are not due in advance. The analogy is inapt.
The taxes were cut 8 years ago. There aren't further "cuts". Billionare tax rates have been the same for the last 8 years, and will continue at the same rate at least into next year.
Such 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.
That'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.
Normally 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.
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?
Pretty sure the data of the past few years has shown we don’t really need a minimum wage apart from ensuring people aren’t absolutely taken advantage of. Nobody is paying just minimum wage anymore, apart from servers and the like that make most of their income from tips. The local McDonalds pays at least 50% more, for instance.
That's a good way of turning the poorest US workers into the poorest US unemployed. If you raise the minimum wage above the actual value of an employee, then they're just going to get fired. Even if they still provide more value than their being paid, it makes automating away their job more competitive.
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.
The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.
> Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
This is false and not at all the reason why the minimum wage exists. It was created to bust sweatshops. You are making the same argument as the people that were defending sweatshops. It may be the argument proponents make now to argue against raising it, but it was not why it was created. Roosevelt literally said that the intent was that any business unable to provide a basic living wage for their workers was one that should not exist.
Perhaps if we taxed the billionaires more we could subsidize increased wages for small business owners or even do something actually good like provide universal basic income so that they cannot be so easily exploited for wildly undervalued labor
Deliberately underpaying people and then telling them their work has low value is one of the most disgusting aspects of capitalists. There's lots of CEOs who are not especially productive, they just have leverage.
The government tries hard to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, but so far has failed 100% of the time. The government can implement wage and price controls, but those still do not set the actual value.
For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it.
BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. Workers can choose to work for you, or not.
You view this as zero sum. How many new business owners would be created if people had enough to save? How many new businesses would exist if more money was flowing in the economy? Should businesses exist if they can't pay livable wages?
These aren't hypothetical questions. We have an answer for them all over the country where state minimum wages are rising in Democratic states.
yeah, actually. If the worst thing you can find when paying living wages for workers is a small drop of 2.7% employment among fast food chains, that sounds like a great trade off.
...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.
http://archive.today/BxREt
Poorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.
And climate change…
Or related to capital, politics, etc.
Thank you for saying this.
"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.
"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.
This is probably cold comfort to a population looking at housing prices rising at 3.7% in 2025 per realtor.com.
It 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.
> 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
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
Wage '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
What 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.
As 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/
("real wages" are wages adjusted for inflation)
I'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.
This probably means that those wages were being suppressed hard for years and they finally weren't able to hire people at that wage anymore
You'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.
All arguments against lower class people getting higher wages are IMHO wildly inappropriate.
"you need lower wages to avoid wage compression", "you need lower wage so we can have more employed people"...
If wage compression occurs, then companies have to deal with Theo senior employees seeking elsewhere - or pay them fairly.
Today, I'd agree. It felt like a dirty thing to even write.
Historically, the lower wage jobs were for kids or bored folk, who'd eventually move onto something better and higher wages.
Recently, the economy isn't great and people take what they can find. There's absolutely no shame in that. I know people in tech who were making low to mid 6 figures now doing retail. The jobs just aren't there, and I constantly fear I'll be in the same boat soon.
But that inevitably does lead to wage compression, which to be clear isn't the fault of the lower wage earners.
Activists love to use the Federal Minimum Wage, which has not increased in a long time (16 years), as their basis for that claim, ignoring how few workers are actually paid the Federal Minimum Wage. It's become a worthless metric for anything other than misleading arguments.
In addition to state and local governments setting their own minimums, the decline in young people and competition for workers in that sector from food delivery companies, has put wage pressure on fast food companies. Most wouldn't be able to open their doors if they tried to pay the Federal Minimum Wage. Had it been pegged to inflation, it would be $10.90/hour, which is less than what fast food workers are paid almost anywhere.
> For the poorest the wages have essentially not increased for a long time right?
No. Nominal wages grew from ‘21 to ‘23, hitting all-time highs in ‘24 [1].
> It hasn’t even kept up with inflation
It did [2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CXU900000LB0102M
[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/
Maybe dramatically increasing the supply of something lowers its price.
Oregon Senator Ron Wyden was bashing Trump for crashing the economy. An economy, Wyden said (paraphrasing) idolized by the world.
Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
Takes $600k/yr now to have buying power of $200k/yr in the 1980s. Inflation in the US has been here for decades hidden as deflation of purchasing power.
Median real wages are up since the 80s by quite a bit:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
> Decades of worsening conditions for the commoner is Ron Wyden's idea of a booming economy. Democrats are useful idiots.
I can't anymore, folks. Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires, increased the deficit by trillions, and kicked millions of people of medicaid. Meanwhile, Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs we've ever seen which affect the poorest the most.
Yet Democrats are the useful idiots. Incredible.
> Trump is out there creating the most regressive tax system via tariffs
Tariffs incentivize domestic production. See the case of chicken tax and pickup trucks. While we do pay for tariffs now, later down the road we should not as more things would be made domestically. If you don’t do tariffs, there is no way to force producers to onshore.
The chicken tax encourages creative workarounds more than domestic production. Importing all the parts and putting them together in the US is production work, so fine. Importing chassis cab and putting a bed on in the US is silly, importing with seats discarded in the US is wasteful (Ford got dinged, but I don't think others did?)
Who's making small cargo vans domestically? Nobody. So they're all 25% more expensive, so you might as well buy a big cargo van when a small one would do.
Honestly, governments buy enough light trucks, that 'buy american' requirements would likely keep at least one company making them here.
> Tariffs incentivize domestic production
Stable, long term tariffs. We’re seeing historic falls in manufacturing employment for a reason.
> Stable, long term tariffs.
Well, you have to start somewhere.
> We’re seeing historic falls in manufacturing employment for a reason.
In your opinion, what is this reason?
> you have to start somewhere
There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.
> what is this reason?
I’m remodelling my deck. I had orders into a steel mill in Utah. Tariffs mean their steel inputs are pricer than competitors in Vietnam. So I switched the order. And I paid with a cheque—if I paid cash I could skip taxes altogether. That wasn’t a thing six months ago.
Meanwhile, software and services aren’t tariffed. Just goods. Guess whose cost of capital has sunk.
> There has been no start. You don’t build a factory because the President announced a tariff that he is also negotiating a trade deal around.
You absolutely do once the math of tariffs makes your manufacturing abroad not competitive with onshored one. Will it apply for all categories of products? Probably not. However, it will definitely apply for many.
I am not sure I understood your reply about the reasons.
> absolutely do once the math of tariffs makes your manufacturing abroad not competitive with onshored one
If someone bet on e.g. our Japan tariffs three months ago, they lost money. (Nobody did. The types that take Trump at his word on tariffs aren’t making economically significant decisions.?
> Republicans passed the largest tax cuts for billionaires
There were no tax cuts for billionaires in the BBB.
(Not increasing the tax is not a "cut".)
It absolutely is when the status quo would have increased taxes. That may not be a cut of current taxes, but in the longer timeframe it is absolutely a tax cut.
Framing it as not increasing taxes being a cut is misleading.
It's just as disingenuous as scaling back a proposed budget increase and calling it a "cut".
The FTC wouldn't let businesses get away with such language, why should the government get a pass?
If a bill due at the end of the month is forgiven on the 25th, were expenses cut? What if the debt is forgiven on the 2nd of the next month?
I’d wager most people would consider those scenario cuts. However, in your framework, the verbiage is different despite a shared outcome.
Bills are not due in advance. The analogy is inapt.
The taxes were cut 8 years ago. There aren't further "cuts". Billionare tax rates have been the same for the last 8 years, and will continue at the same rate at least into next year.
Works if/when archive.today is blocked
No Javascript required
Why does this work for the FT site?
simply disabling JS seems to do it
> 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?
Got an offer from a competitor, used it to negotiate a 20% raise.
Fairly certain the OP was talking about an annual "cost of living" adjustment, and not job searching for a better offer.
Fairly certain the quoted statistic was talking about total results, not people who stayed at the same job.
6% last year here.
> 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.
Alternatively, he wants someone at the top who will create an organization that does not have to repeatedly restate massively incorrect numbers.
Such 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.
They shouldn’t announce until it’s accurate then?
That'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.
Normally 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.
Unless they are accurate most of the time, I would agree with this.
How 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
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?
The numbers get better as they get more data.
Why not wait to release them until enough data has come in that it's settled? Serious question, what's the downside?
Because the market values the early results and has an adult understanding of what the numbers mean.
Because the law requires them to release reports on certain dates, so they do so and then make corrections as more data comes in.
Thanks.
I think you understand how labor statistics work about as well as Trump.
Or rather not mention them at all. He'd rather not bring attention to the topic to begin with.
the min wage is long overdue, its should be somewhere near $25/hr this is how you 'tax' billionaires
Why?
Pretty sure the data of the past few years has shown we don’t really need a minimum wage apart from ensuring people aren’t absolutely taken advantage of. Nobody is paying just minimum wage anymore, apart from servers and the like that make most of their income from tips. The local McDonalds pays at least 50% more, for instance.
I 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.
That's a good way of turning the poorest US workers into the poorest US unemployed. If you raise the minimum wage above the actual value of an employee, then they're just going to get fired. Even if they still provide more value than their being paid, it makes automating away their job more competitive.
California tried this with a $20/hr minimum wage in fast food restaurants: the next time you go into a McDonalds, count the number of empty cash registers and number of shiny new ordering kiosks: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
Pure japes.
Ordering kiosks mean we can meet volume because more time is spent in production. Same with mobile ordering.
The employee count doesn't need to change up or down.
McDonalds were going to do that anyway.
And what's the point of a minimum wage of it doesn't provide a living? That's just letting private enterprise piggyback off the welfare system.
Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
Not a family. Especially not families with - for other reasons- only one breadwinner.
The problems of poverty (to the extent the US even experiences it) are broader than demanding someone make uneconomic decisions with their investors capital.
Why not?
I know several people supporting families on minimum wage.
Do they not deserve to be paid more?
> Good question - it has a partial answer: minimum wage is to provide a living to a single young person for a shortish period.
This is false and not at all the reason why the minimum wage exists. It was created to bust sweatshops. You are making the same argument as the people that were defending sweatshops. It may be the argument proponents make now to argue against raising it, but it was not why it was created. Roosevelt literally said that the intent was that any business unable to provide a basic living wage for their workers was one that should not exist.
According to the WSJ, the California minimum wage increase for fast food workers reduced the number of those jobs by 20,000.
This is how you tax small business owners. The vast majority of businesses are not owned by billionaires
Perhaps if we taxed the billionaires more we could subsidize increased wages for small business owners or even do something actually good like provide universal basic income so that they cannot be so easily exploited for wildly undervalued labor
The value of labor is what people are willing to pay for it.
Deliberately underpaying people and then telling them their work has low value is one of the most disgusting aspects of capitalists. There's lots of CEOs who are not especially productive, they just have leverage.
The government tries hard to repeal the Law of Supply and Demand, but so far has failed 100% of the time. The government can implement wage and price controls, but those still do not set the actual value.
For example, in the USSR, the price of bread was fixed by the state. But the real price of bread was how long you were willing to wait in line for it.
BTW, in the US, you are free to set up a company and then pay your workers whatever you want to. Workers can choose to work for you, or not.
You view this as zero sum. How many new business owners would be created if people had enough to save? How many new businesses would exist if more money was flowing in the economy? Should businesses exist if they can't pay livable wages?
These aren't hypothetical questions. We have an answer for them all over the country where state minimum wages are rising in Democratic states.
Is the answer a good one? https://www.nber.org/papers/w34033
yeah, actually. If the worst thing you can find when paying living wages for workers is a small drop of 2.7% employment among fast food chains, that sounds like a great trade off.
Seriously, do some introspection here.
Why not $250/hr? Or $2,500/hr?
There is just no advantage to being poor in America.
Why should there be an advantage to being poor?
...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.