

For the employed, the current recession has pushed wages up - mcantelon
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/11/business/economy/11leonhardt.html?_r=1&hp

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gamble
I am skeptical that employers have been raising wages. The average could have
increased simply because job losses have been concentrated at the low end of
the wage scale.

Even if we are in a deflationary environment, that isn't necessarily good for
the average person either. Their wages may be worth more in real terms, but
deflation would increase the value of their debt as well. With so many
underwater mortgages and a middle class riddled with consumer debt, prolonged
deflation would be much, much worse than inflation.

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electromagnetic
My wage was raised by about 8% and my friends by around the same (same
company). The company used the recession to lay off a few bad eggs and raised
pay for everyone who stayed on.

Big employers might not be raising wages, however small employers either made
it or went broke in the recession (at least here in Canada). I can only really
speak for the construction sector, but this has been the norm here. Bad
companies have thankfully gone under and the companies left are making the
profits.

There's still work there from all the companies that went broke because they
were skirting the margins _before_ the recession, which means the companies
that were doing well before the recession have been riding it out and
absorbing the jobs of others. Right now we can't go fast enough, which is
bizarre this early out of a recession.

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blahblahblah
Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

There seem to be some serious flaws in their reasoning. First, as others have
noted, it's likely that layoffs disproportionately affected low wage earners.
Pay is a measure of the perceived value of an employee to the organization and
the perceived value of the employee is precisely the criterion most likely to
be used in determining who to lay off/fire. Without raising any individual's
pay, simply laying off low wage earners raises median pay. Second, salaried
employees are doing considerably more work to pick up the slack for all the
positions that have been eliminated. Even if their absolute wages have risen,
it's unlikely that their wages have risen in direct proportion to their
increased productivity. Real wages, in terms of inflation-adjusted wages per
unit of value added by the employee has likely fallen significantly.

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gojomo
This isn't too surprising; many government mandates and economic factors (such
as runaway health costs) have been raising the cost of employees by a fixed
amount per head. And technology often offers increasing returns to expertise
and experience rather than headcount.

Thus, if faced with a choice between hiring 5% more employees, or doing other
things (such as capital investments or new incentives) to get 5% more
productivity from existing workers, the latter is becoming more attractive.
Hence, fewer employees -- but employees that are higher-paid and higher-
skilled.

(Many of the things intended to help low-wage and low-skill workers -- minimum
wages, minimum benefits packages, new legal protections -- actually wind up
raising the breakeven point for taking such workers on. Businesses then prefer
other less-labor-intensive strategies to increase production, and the intended
beneficiaries of these policies wind up worse off. But they still keep voting
for the superficially-attractive policies. The bloodletting will continue
until the patient improves!)

