PrefBlog

A bit more on the pandemic recovery:

One of the biggest, and perhaps unsurprising, divides is that of income. Lower-paid workers lost more jobs and more hours of work than those with higher pay, partly a reflection of the lockdown of the lower-wage services sector and the ability of higher paid professionals to work from home.

But the magnitude of that divide is revealing. For workers earning around minimum wage, paid $14 an hour or less, 23 per cent either lost their job by August or saw their hours cut by more than half. Workers in the middle of the wage scale, with an hourly rate between $25 and $28, fared better, with just 7 per cent unemployed or losing more than half of their hours.

But for the highest paid workers, the recession had come and gone by August. The top two income categories, those earning between $40 and $48 an hour, and more than $48, did experience a loss of jobs and hours worked in the early days of the pandemic. But they quickly rebounded from those relatively small losses, as the chart below indicates. For those earning $48 an hour or more, 4 per cent more were employed or worked more than in February, before the pandemic shut down the economy.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2020 at 6:25 pm and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.