From housing economist Tom Lawler: February Decline in Average Hourly Earnings Growth No Surprise
To the surprise of no one who read either this report or the CalculatedRisk blog (which occasionally reproduces my report), the year-over-year growth in average hourly earnings of all employees on private nonfarm payrolls declined in February to 2.6%, down from the 2.9% shown in the January report (revised down to 2.8%.) Equally unsurprising was that the slowdown in AHE reflected a decline in the growth of AHE of “supervisory” workers (not shown in the BLS report, but derivable from data in the report) following two outsized gains in the previous two months (both of which were revised downward).
| Monthly % Change, Average Hourly Earnings of Private NonFarm Workers (SA) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| February Report | January Report | |||||
| Total | Prod/Non | Super | Total | Prod/Non | Super | |
| November | 0.26% | 0.23% | 0.26% | 0.26% | 0.23% | 0.26% |
| December | 0.38% | 0.36% | 0.37% | 0.41% | 0.36% | 0.50% |
| January | 0.26% | 0.13% | 0.56% | 0.34% | 0.13% | 0.80% |
| February | 0.15% | 0.27% | -0.12% | |||
| “Prod/Non” is Production/Nonsupervisory, “Super” is Supervisory. | ||||||
Average Hourly Earnings for production/nonsupervisory employees actually showed a modest acceleration in growth last month, though the overall growth rate remained, at least to some, disappointing.
See Lawler’s report from February 9, 2018 for further discussion.