DAVID BLANCHFLOWER
Working for less—and now less work too: Pay packets shrank, then they got harder to come by
A big squeeze on American wages has been occurring for a generation: earnings first went into free fall back in the 1970s. Real pay (measured in 1982-84 dollars) sank from a peak of a weekly $345 in February 1973 to $264 in January 1996. Things have bounced back a bit since, but only half way. The chart is for all “production and nonsupervisory employees,” which captures roughly 80 per cent of all private-sector staff —so not just the working class but also the great American middle class as was. Until the 1990s, an underlying rise in the number of women earning compensated for the loss. But since the millennium—and especially since the financial crisis—the overall employment rate has dropped.