For three million working Wisconsinites, wages are the most important measure of the quality of their jobs.
Despite the global pandemic and the restructuring of every aspect of work and life in response to it, wages continue to provide an essential lens on job quality and inequality in the state.
In this section, we rely on most recent available data from the Current Population Survey and provide median wage series through 2020. The 2020 data captures some of the impact of the pandemic and associated shutdowns that began last March. We discuss wage trends in the last two years but also provide context from the last forty years.
Wage trends over the last 40 years fall short of the norm established in the post-war period. From the end of World War II until the 1970s, median wages were closely tied to overall economic growth. As the economy grew and productivity increased, workers’ wages advanced. This was the period of “shared prosperity,” when growing GDP was linked directly to growing paychecks for workers.
Read the full article at: https://workingwi.org/wages/