EPI | Over 1/4 of men 25-34 years old earned poverty-level wages in 2013

By Elise Gould

In honor of Father’s Day, we looked at the wages of male workers at the prime age for raising young children. While women have always been more likely to earn poverty-level wages than men (wages less than what a full-time, year-round worker needs to sustain a family of four at the official poverty threshold), women have seen some improvement over the last three-and-a-half decades, as their rates of poverty-level wages have declined, especially among those 35 to 44 years old. On the other hand, men between 25 and 44 have seen precipitous increases in the share working at such low wages, with the share more than doubling between 1979 and 2013. This trend has been particularly stark among the younger age group. The figure below shows the share of male and female workers between 25 and 34 and between 35 and 44 years old who earn poverty-level wages. In 2013, that hourly wage was $11.49. Over one-fourth of men 25-34 years old earned poverty-level wages in 2013. The bottom line is there are a great many adults, and an increasing share of men, stuck in very low-paying jobs, and they are the same people who are responsible for raising the next generation.

See rest here.

The United States of Poverty and Inequality

Over the last three decades the wealth of the nation's very richest 1% has grown ten times that of the average worker, and over that time period that same elite has captured more than half of the entire income increases, leaving the bottom 99% to divide the remaining gains. This is all based on a new state-level study by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), The Increasingly Unequal States of America: Income Inequality by State, which looks at how inequality has seized hold of the national economy both in the generation leading up to the great recession of 2008 and in the several years following the so-called 'recovery'.

The levels of inequality we are seeing across the country provide more proof that the economy is not working for the vast majority of Americans and has not for decades; it is unconscionable that most of America’s families have shared in so little of the country’s prosperity over the last several decades. 

Check out the state-by-state map on inequality generated by the study.

And for a recent analysis by Dr. Gerald Friedman on the so-called 'recovery', see here

Austerity Explains Extremely Weak Recovery From Great Recession

Recovering from the Great Recession has been accompanied by the slowest growth of public spending following lower troughs of the business cycle since World War II. Read more here.

The wageless recovery and the two-speed recovery

Is this a wageless recovery? No doubt in the United States, and also in a good part of the rest of the developed world (e.g. Europe and Japan).  In the case of the US real wages have stagnated since the 1970s.  The recovery may very well be wageless, but in all fairness that has been a perennial characteristic of the American economy.  In Europe there were marked differences between Greece and Iceland, where real wages were growing until the crisis, and Germany, where they have basically stagnated.  So the wageless recovery is basically an American, German and Japanese story.

In developing countries, however, the story is quite different.  The graph below shows real wages in advanced, Latin American and Asian economies (there are also significant variations between and within the two sub-regional groups).  The graphs come from the International Labour Office's Global Wage Report 2010/11 (available here).



Note that both in Asia and Latin America real wages did not fall in 2008, and started to recover in 2009.  In Latin America, according to ECLAC (in the Preliminary Overview Statistical Annex Table A-18, p. 150) in 2010 real wages increased on average 1.7 per cent.  Essentially at the same pace than the previous years.  Also, it seems that wages continue to grow in Asian countries (particularly in urban China).  Perhaps, the reason for the so-called two-speed recovery is associated to the different patterns of real wage dynamics, and not just about commodity prices.  Expansion of domestic demand in the periphery (or at least in some countries) might be relevant too. Just saying.