Here’s some good news in this good-news jobs report: Earnings climbed last month. That means that while many more Americans are finding jobs, the ones that are already working got a boost, too.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average workweek for people employed by private companies edged up to 34.5 hours in November. That’s about where it’s been for the past few years. Average hourly earnings among private employees also rose 4 cents, to $24.15. Hourly earnings have now increased about 2 percent this year, with the average worker making about $833 a week this year, versus $814 a week last year. (The last year has seen gains once you adjust for inflation, too.)
Those aren’t big gains, of course. But they come after a period during which the recession and sluggish recovery in some cases battered the earnings of people who were working - not just those who weren’t.
Those increasing earnings might translate into increasing consumer spending - which would help to bolster the slow, if virtuous, cycle of growth seen of late. In a separate release, the Commerce Department said that personal income fell slightly in October. (It found that private wages and salaries grew; income fell in part because of declines in earnings for proprietors and asset-holders.) On the back of those numbers, Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics expects real fourth-quarter consumption to grow at a 2.5 percent rate, the best since the first quarter of 2012.
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