Poorest US workers hit hardest by slowing wage growth
33 comments
·August 4, 2025yalogin
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.
hellgas00
"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.
lumost
This is probably cold comfort to a population looking at housing prices rising at 3.7% in 2025 per realtor.com.
JKCalhoun
"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.
mnhnthrow34
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.
rr808
> 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?
hiddencost
Got an offer from a competitor, used it to negotiate a 20% raise.
galleywest200
Fairly certain the OP was talking about an annual "cost of living" adjustment, and not job searching for a better offer.
fluxkernel
Poorest workers are hit hardest by pretty much anything related to money.
cowcity
Or related to capital, politics, etc.
user9999999999
the min wage is long overdue, its should be somewhere near $25/hr this is how you 'tax' billionaires
shmerl
> 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.
topspin
Questioning government numbers is now acceptable and not "misinformation." Got it.
trealira
Yeah, firing the labor statistics head because Trump say she's been faking the numbers to make him look bad actually makes it seem both obviously politically motivated and casts whatever comes after into doubt. Now their credibility is degraded.
That's different from just saying the numbers are obviously being faked under Biden or whatever with no real evidence because you just feel like the economy is bad and assume corruption. Now there actually does seem to be corruption!
scarface_74
The President just fired the person in charge of reporting jobs numbers because he didn’t like the report.
Logically what do you think is about to happen?
esseph
It IS THE GOVERNMENT
hyperadvanced
On this topic- last year it was somewhat common for R politicians to criticize the D regime for the “report high, revise low” strategy - if anything, I guess, this firing has been telegraphed. Anyway, those people were also called conspiracy theorists and politically motivated. There’s clearly a conflict of interest between the facts and what is politically expedient on all sides of the political system in the USA.
I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy. I doubt Trump has that goal in mind necessarily, laudable as it might be.
koolba
Alternatively, he wants someone at the top who will create an organization that does not have to repeatedly restate massively incorrect numbers.
keeda
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.
mensetmanusman
They shouldn’t announce until it’s accurate then?
altcognito
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?
magic_man
The numbers get better as they get more data.
mh-
Why not wait to release them until enough data has come in that it's settled? Serious question, what's the downside?
EndsOfnversion
I think you understand how labor statistics work about as well as Trump.
shmerl
Or rather not mention them at all. He'd rather not bring attention to the topic to begin with.
http://archive.today/BxREt