late 1980s: the one between the top and very top on the one hand and all other Wage Trends and Patterns to earners, including even those at the 95th be Explained percentile, on the other, and the gap be- tween high earners and middle earners, il- There are three disparities in growth lustrated by the ratio of wages at the 95th of wages by workers’ wage rankings that (or 90th) percentile and the me. [...] compensation of the growth of wage and In the most recent period from 2000 to benefit inequality and the loss of labour’s 2019 the inequality factors can explain 92 share and thus measures the counterfactual per cent of the divergence and the differ- of how much faster median hourly com- ence in deflators was much less important pensation could have grown had inequality (8 per cent). [...] growth suppression The Failure of Automation and The decline in labour’s share of in- Skill Gaps to Explain Wage come Suppression or Wage Inequality One of the trends that alerted ana- The predominant explanation offered by lysts to the erosion of worker bargaining economists, pundits, policymakers, and the power and the corresponding strengthen- media to explain sluggish wage growth and ing of em. [...] While this suppression to account for the divergence article does not undertake to directly ex- between the growth of net productivity plain the growth of wages at the very top and median hourly compensation over the those of the top 0.1 per cent and 1 per 1979–2017 period cent we would argue that this growth is the mirror image of wage suppression at Relation to other literature the bottom. [...] This section examines the corporate and The impact of specific factors on the government policy levers that have sup- growth of the median wage is detailed in pressed wage growth, and concludes that the first panel (Table 2) and draws on the they can account for the vast majority of discussion above.
- Pages
- 37
- Published in
- Canada
