The Bureau of Labor Statistics has been collecting data on personal income of production and nonsupervisory private employees for the past half century. Investment adviser Doug Short has been turning the data into charts for several years.
Last Friday, these three were among those he produced. The first one you see above depicts the real (that is, the inflation-adjusted) average (the mean) hourly earnings. Means are always best viewed alongside medians to get a better picture. But these particular data don't include the median. (Note that, in order to show contrast better, the y axis on these charts is not set at zero.)
As you can see, the real average is 8 percent below what it was in late 1972.
The next chart shows the average weekly hours worked by private production and non-supervisory employees. On average, five fewer hours than in mid-1966. That reduction wouldn't hardly be a bad thing—if wages had also risen in the same period.
Finally, there's the third chart, which multiplies real average wages with weekly working hours. That generates the hypothetical amount a production or non-supervisory worker would make if s/he were earning both the real average and putting in the the average number of hours.
As Short
writes:
If we multiply the hypothetical weekly earnings by 50, we get an annual figure of $34,983. That's a 15.4 percent decline from the similarly calculated real peak in October 1972. In the charts above, I've highlighted the presidencies during this timeframe. My purpose is not necessarily to suggest political responsibility, but rather to offer some food for thought. I will point out that the so-called supply side economics popularized during the Reagan administration (aka "trickle-down" economics), wasn't very friendly to production and nonsupervisory employees.
Indeed, it was not.