Wage growth for typical workers decelerated rapidly in the mid-1970s and never really recovered: Average annual wage growth for production and nonsupervisory workers, 1979–2017
| 3-year moving average, ahe_prod | |
|---|---|
| 1950 | 3.52% |
| 1951 | 3.39% |
| 1952 | 3.51% |
| 1953 | 3.91% |
| 1954 | 3.76% |
| 1955 | 4.02% |
| 1956 | 3.78% |
| 1957 | 3.76% |
| 1958 | 2.23% |
| 1959 | 1.88% |
| 1960 | 1.85% |
| 1961 | 2.36% |
| 1962 | 2.02% |
| 1963 | 1.89% |
| 1964 | 1.74% |
| 1965 | 1.83% |
| 1966 | 1.77% |
| 1967 | 1.48% |
| 1968 | 1.21% |
| 1969 | 1.44% |
| 1970 | 1.48% |
| 1971 | 1.55% |
| 1972 | 2.43% |
| 1973 | 2.74% |
| 1974 | 1.91% |
| 1975 | -0.14% |
| 1976 | -0.48% |
| 1977 | 0.11% |
| 1978 | 1.15% |
| 1979 | 0.95% |
| 1980 | 0.04% |
| 1981 | -0.70% |
| 1982 | -1.14% |
| 1983 | -0.95% |
| 1984 | -1.09% |
| 1985 | -1.01% |
| 1986 | -0.90% |
| 1987 | -0.97% |
| 1988 | -0.83% |
| 1989 | -0.74% |
| 1990 | -0.49% |
| 1991 | -0.55% |
| 1992 | -0.56% |
| 1993 | -0.45% |
| 1994 | -0.04% |
| 1995 | 0.16% |
| 1996 | 0.54% |
| 1997 | 0.98% |
| 1998 | 1.51% |
| 1999 | 1.77% |
| 2000 | 1.72% |
| 2001 | 1.45% |
| 2002 | 1.16% |
| 2003 | 1.00% |
| 2004 | 0.61% |
| 2005 | 0.40% |
| 2006 | 0.44% |
| 2007 | 0.99% |
| 2008 | 1.28% |
| 2009 | 0.43% |
| 2010 | 0.27% |
| 2011 | -0.08% |
| 2012 | 0.19% |
| 2013 | -0.06% |
| 2014 | 0.10% |
| 2015 | 0.67% |
| 2016 | 0.71% |
| 2017 | 0.66% |
Notes: Data on hourly wages for production and non-supervisory workers are taken from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The figure shows three-year moving averages of this hourly wage growth. The nominal wages taken from the CES are deflated by a measure of the core CPI-U-RS price series. Because a measure of the CPI-U-RS core did not extend back to 1948, this measure is constructed by taking the ratio of the overall and core measures of the deflator for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) and applying it to overall CPI-U-RS growth. The PCE deflators are taken from the National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), Table 2.3.4.
Previous chart: « Real wages and compensation, various measures, 2009–2017