http://www.epi.org/blog/american-pay-and-productivity-for-typical-workers-still-not-growing-together/
ames Sherk at the Heritage Foundation has written a piece claiming that there has been no gap between growth in productivity and growth in pay. It's written largely as an attempted debunking of our work, but since there's not actually any bunk in this work, the attempt fails.
Sherk raises many issues. Some have a bit of validity to them, some do not. I'll discuss some of the nitpickier bits of his piece a bit later. In the end, however, the difference between his findings and ours boils down to the fact that he ignores the effect of rising inequality in driving a wedge between productivity and pay. And it's true that if you ignore inequality, you get a much sunnier view of American wage performance in recent decades. But that's the whole point, no?
Past all the hand-waving, the difference between Sherk's findings and ours is completely dominated by the same single point of contention that comes up in every debate about growth in productivity and pay: the difference between average versus typical pay growth. The title of our most recent piece on this topic is: Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker's Pay. That "typical" in the title is important. We look at two measures of hourly pay that we argue are relevant for typical American workers: average pay for private-sector production and non-supervisory workers from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) and the median worker from the Current Population Survey (CPS). Production and non-supervisory workers constitute 80 percent of the private workforce. We think that seems pretty typical. The median worker in the CPS is that worker who earns higher hourly pay that half of the workforce and lower hourly pay than half. This also seems broadly representative to us.
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