Workers

NY Times -   In a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Niklas Engbom, Aniket Baksy and Daniele Caratelli analyzed Current Population Survey federal data from 1982 to 2023 to try to figure out why wage growth has been weak over four decades. They estimate that “employed workers today are about half as likely to receive a better-paying outside offer as they were in the 1980s,” and major salary jumps often happen when you move to another company.

.... Engbom and his colleagues offer two main arguments for why American workers are less likely than they used to be 40 years ago to receive competitive offers. The first is “increased employer concentration.....” 

The media industry is a great example of this. There used to be a thriving network of local newspapers and TV and radio stations to work for, but more and more of those outlets have shut down or are owned by a handful of conglomerates. Consolidation has also gone up in the tech and health care industries....

The other reason Engbom and his co-authors offer for the broken job ladder is the rise of noncompete agreements that prevent employees from working for a competitor, often in a defined geographic region and for a specific amount of time. While state laws concerning noncompete clauses vary, Engbom said that in the 1980s, courts started siding with employers more and allowing these agreements to be enforced. The Federal Trade Commission issued a rule banning their use in 2024, but business groups sued to get the rule overturned, and later that year the ban was blocked by the courts.