PIC your pay policy.

The sad part about any data out of a politically focused organization is that even when the data is really good, you still have to double check all of it for determining if it’s skewed.   There is a fount of information here, now I just have to figure out how good it really is before I can use it, but a cursory glance has a few interesting points for PIC’s.

The next section i’m going to write about after I finish the benefits section of the book is the lifestyle realities section. I.e. What does it cost to have a kid today?  What are our real wages and why?  What are the demands on our life today that was different than they were in decades past?  Some of this I’ve already been able to touch on, but i’m going to do a deeper dive as these questions deserve a pretty big section.

This report speaks to the wage data and like I said there is a ton of information here.  As complex and voluminous as the data is, the story is pretty straight forward.. wage data isn’t going up, not if you look at it in terms of real dollars.

Although this paper is primarily aimed at low to moderate income workers, the challenges of wage growth hit the Professional Individual Contributor population as well.  Especially those who have fallen into the Bachelor Black Hole.  The report specifically states:

• Between 1979 and 2013, productivity grew 64.9 percent, while hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers, who comprise 80 percent of the private-sector workforce, grew just 8.2 percent.
  • Productivity thus grew eight times faster than typical worker compensation.
• The vast majority of college graduates have seen only small wage gains since 2000.
• Even at the 90th percentile, college graduates’ hourly wages only increased 4.4 percent cumulatively from 2000 to 2013.
• Entry-level hourly wages fell on average for both female and male college graduates from 2000 to 2013 (8.1  percent among women and 6.7 percent among men).

So let me put this in terms that PIC’s who don’t have time to read detailed technical wage data reports can easily understand:  Our income growth sucks and has for a while now even though we are working harder and doing more.  I don’t believe that’s skewed data, I believe that’s a preferred report out that is heard on an investor call which is why it exists.

via Raising America’s Pay: Why It’s Our Central Economic Policy Challenge | Economic Policy Institute.