Wage stickiness ?

Sorry for the thin posting lately…I have had some SI joint problems which makes for difficulty sitting still to focus.

Via Keven Drum comes this research paper addressing the issue of sticky wages in the economics of today:

First off, a new paper by a trio of researchers confirms some old news: Adjusted for inflation, wages began stagnating for both men and women 10 years ago. Men’s wages have actually decreased slightly since 2000, while women’s wages, which had been rising steadily for decades, flattened out nearly to zero. But it could have been worse. Economists have long known that there’s a floor to wages because employers don’t like to reduce nominal wages. If you make $10 per hour, they won’t cut your wage to $9 per hour. They’ll just hold it at $10 and let inflation eat it away. This phenomenon is called wage stickiness.

But in “Wage Adjustment in the Great Recession,” these researchers have found that wage stickiness, which is driven mostly by social convention, not economic law, might be dying out. During the Great Recession, employers were increasingly willing to cut nominal wages. Among hourly workers, the usual number who experience wage cuts is around 15 percent. That had risen to 25 percent by 2011. Among nonhourly workers, the number rose from about 25 percent to nearly 35 percent. Increasingly, it seems, wage stickiness isn’t acting as a barrier against wage losses.

Economist Jared Bernstein points us to the chart below.

nominal_wages_comp