Employee Compensation Continues to Rise
From NAM Input (National Association of Manufacturers)
American workers saw their pay and benefits increase 0.7 percent in the first quarter, reports the AP. More:
- “The data, released Tuesday by the Labor Department, suggests that growth in workers’ compensation has stalled in recent months. In the first quarter, wages and benefits increased 2.8% compared with a year earlier.”
- “That’s down slightly from a 2.9% annual gain in the final quarter of 2018. Still, workers’ compensation has picked up slowly. Five years ago, quarterly gains were closer to 0.4%.”
- “The job market is very tight, with the unemployment rate at 3.8%, near a 50-year low, and there are more open jobs than unemployed workers. That has pushed up wages over time, though the gains aren’t as healthy as they were the last time the jobless rate was this low.”
Meanwhile, a new Gallup poll finds that Americans haven’t been this confident in their personal finances since 2002. More from The Hill:
- “A Gallup poll released Tuesday found that 56 percent of respondents felt positively about their finances, with 12 percent rating their personal financial holdings as ‘excellent’ and 44 percent rating them as ‘good.’”
- “That overall confidence score is 10 points higher than in 2015, according to a Gallup poll taken at the time.”
- “Of those surveyed, 57 percent said that their financial outlook was improving year-to-year, an uptick of 10 points over a Gallup survey taken in 2016, according to a press release. That percentage is also the highest registered in Gallup surveys since 2002.”