“Somehow we are doing even better financially, and it feels a bit awkward.”Įven for those doing well, the economy feels precarious. McCauley, 36, who works for a data orchestration company. “We are very fortunate right now given the situation for many others during the pandemic,” said Mr. “It’s a time of prosperity, a time of abundance, and yet it doesn’t seem that way,” said Andy Walden, vice president of enterprise research at Black Knight, which analyzes financial data. That disparity might account for the muted sense of achievement. But things haven’t been so positive for all professions, especially pharmacists. Slow Wage Growth: Pay has been rising rapidly for workers at the top and the bottom.But as the Federal Reserve tries to tame inflation, those gains could be eroded. Black Employment: Black workers saw wages and employment rates go up in the wake of the pandemic.But a year and a half into his presidency, little has been done at the federal level. Gig Workers: Labor activists hoped President Biden would tackle gig worker issues aggressively.August Jobs Report: Job growth slowed in August but stayed solid, suggesting that the labor market recovery remains resilient, even as companies pull back on hiring.The State of Jobs in the United States Economists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation. It offers a reason for the rise in interest in unionizing companies from Amazon to Apple to Starbucks, as hourly workers seek to claim their share.Īnd it helps explain why Dwight and Denise Makinson just returned from a 12-day cruise through Germany.
It accounts for the abundance of $1 billion start-ups known as unicorns - more than 1,000 now, up from about 200 in 2015. This widespread wealth throws light on why the number of workers who say they expect to be working past their early 60s has fallen below 50 percent for the first time. “You’d have to go back to the late 1990s to find a similar era.
“Maybe it’s easier to focus on the negative, but a huge number of people, maybe 40 million households, have been doing pretty well,” said Dean Baker, an economist who was a co-founder of the liberal-leaning Center for Economic and Policy Research. A few years ago, the monthly total was between three million and 3.5 million. More than 4.5 million workers voluntarily quit in March, the highest number since the government started keeping this statistic in 2000, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week.