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Business/Finance See other Business/Finance Articles Title: Wondering Why You’re Not Getting Paid More? Here Are the Reasons … Wondering Why You’re Not Getting Paid More? Here Are the Reasons … Mike Larson | Thursday, June 4, 2015 at 4:30 pm Why aren’t I making more money? It’s a question you’ve probably asked yourself, and it’s more important now than ever before. After all, home prices are rising. Health-care costs are soaring. And everything from college costs to groceries seems to get more expensive every year. We’ll get fresh data on wages and job growth tomorrow morning, when the Labor Department releases its latest monthly report for May. In the meantime, the Wall Street Journal tried to answer the big-picture wage question by doing a deep dive into the data. It analyzed the situation on the ground and in the numbers for metropolitan regions around the country. The goal: Try to explain why wages aren’t rising at anywhere near their old rates – despite the steep fall in the “official” unemployment rate. A major employment report is due Friday. People are finding jobs, but salaries aren’t necessarily rising. The Journal’s conclusions: ==> Too much “hidden” labor supply. That includes temporary workers who are competing with others for any job they can get, and discouraged workers who previously dropped off the “available to work” labor rolls – but are coming back and competing for new positions now. ==> Too much foreign competition. When companies overseas are paying workers much less, and able to undercut our companies thanks to the dollar’s rise, it puts a lid on U.S. wage growth. The New York Times highlighted an example of that yesterday, chronicling how Walt Disney (DIS) just laid off hundreds of U.S. IT workers. It hired an outsourcing firm that uses cheaper foreign labor to do the work, and even made the U.S. workers train their replacements if they wanted to get a decent severance package. ==> Too little productivity and too much of a recession hangover. These concepts are more nebulous, but it boils down to the fact that companies believe they aren’t getting enough output from workers to pay much more. Executives are also afraid to boost pay too much because of fear of a renewed economic downturn, considering we suffered the worst slump since the Great Depression only a few years ago. “What will it take to get us out of this rut?” All told, the Journal found that unemployment rates in many regions are now lower than they were before the economy got shot to heck in 2008. But the 4% or 5% wage increases we saw back then, or in the 1990s, are now more like increases of 2% to 3% – if that. What will it take to get us out of this rut? Is there some kind of policy prescription to jump start things? Politicians are flailing about, trying to answer those questions. But the proposals announced to date haven’t done much, including state and local efforts to raise the minimum wage to well above the federal level. Ultimately, it may just take the passage of even more time between the Great Recession and today. Time to replace lost productivity, lost confidence and lost demand. Not what the average American wants to hear, unfortunately, but it seems to be our sad reality. So what do you think? What will get American wage growth back on track? Any evidence in your own personal experience that lower unemployment rates are boosting wage and salary increases? Or do you find that your pay, or the pay of your employees, is continuing to stagnate? Let me know your views over at the Money and Markets website – because this is a hugely important issue. Poster Comment: Where I work, the women have to stop working when they are talking so they can look at each other. That is a great time waster. Of course, they pay us special wages where I am because we all have disabilities. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: BTP Holdings (#0)
These costs will soar even more if wages and salaries are increased. Negotiate wage increases in terms of increased production not on the extent of featherbedding.
We get paid different amounts for what we do, depending on the type of work we perform. At the "workshop", we do recycling, and other jobs as they come along. It's like the boss told this one lady that worked there, "If you don't unroll paper, I don't get paid." "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one." Edmund Burke
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