According to the article, as the Labor Department said, average hourly payment for American workers increased by 0.5% last month which was the best performances since the recession ended. Even though it seems a good news, however, as the author said, there's still something need to be reconsidered. First is that the leap in January, which is the beginning of a year, might reveals the increasing of cost-of-living in the year. Secondly, even though the minimum wage of many states has increased, as we mentioned in class, increasing of minimum wages actually cannot influence much people, because this doesn't mean the increase of overall income. Third, the article talked about that the increase of income might be the end-of-year bonuses. The last point mentioned in the article is the influence of decreased unemployment rate, which is similar to what we have talked about in class. With the decreasing unemployment rate, employers might raise their wages to keep the workers.
here's the link: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/02/05/management-bonuses-minimum-wage-increases-may-have-juiced-wage-numbers/
On one hand, wage growth can motivate employees to do their job better, and improve their efficiency; on another hand, employers might feel stressed out about the rising labor cost, they might fire some people.
ReplyDeleteIf the real wage keep growing, inflation rate might increase, but US economy is in a pretty good shape now, a slight increase wouldn't hurt many people.