Who's Getting Raises and Are They Beating Inflation?
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Here's your money briefing for Friday, January 21st. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal. In today's labor market, the balance of power is held by workers rather than employers. There are far more open positions than people looking for a job, and some companies are paying top dollar for employees. But workers aren't in equally high demand in all places.
The South has recovered the largest share of its jobs since the pandemic started, and its unemployment rate is really low, as is the Midwest.
But which industries are ramping up hiring, and what kinds of workers are in demand, and who's getting the biggest pay raises? WSJ reporter Sarah Chaney-Cambon and the journal's economics team have been digging into all of those numbers, and we'll talk with her about it after the break.
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We've been talking quite a bit about companies that are struggling to fill open positions and how they're trying to attract candidates with better pay.
What is the episode's focus on wages, hiring, and inflation?
But who's getting these jobs? Where are they finding them? And is there higher pay enough to offset inflation? Here to talk about it is WSJ economics reporter Sarah Cheney-Cambon. Sarah, thank you so much for being with us.
Thanks so much for having me, JR.
So, Sarah, you and the economics team have run a top-to-bottom report on the labor force, so there's a lot to get into. Let's start with who's benefiting the most from this tight labor market and getting the most jobs.
One group of workers that's really benefited in the last several months has been younger workers. So we're talking about teenagers, people aged 16 to 24 have really been hopping back into the labor force. They've been getting jobs at places like restaurants and amusement parks, lots of leisure and hospitality type jobs as that sector has bounced back over the past year. They tend to be lower paying jobs. However, what's interesting is that the pay in those jobs is actually going up a lot. So we've seen that wages for people aged 16 to 24 have been rising a ton in recent months. So there is something unique about how this group of young people has grown. emerged as labor market beneficiaries. Less educated workers, so people with a high school degree or less, have seen big wage gains.
However, they have been unlikely to jump back into the workforce during the pandemic.
You mentioned jobs in the service industry. What's driving the trend in these sectors?
So basically, you have the fact that a lot of restaurants, for instance, are in desperate need of workers. So there's lots of job opportunities there. And people in the restaurant industry are quitting at really high rates to get big pay increases. The other blue collar jobs that have seen really strong growth in job openings over the past year have been sectors like manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, just basically any type of job that helps make and deliver goods to your door. It's really just been the surge in e-commerce that we've seen during the pandemic.
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