Average wages for production and non-managerial workers in the private, leisure and hospitality industries, as well as median wage growth as implied, are higher than in December 2019, before the outbreak.
figure 1: Chain CPI deflates real wages in the private sector (blue), leisure and hospitality (tan) and the level implied by median overall wage growth (green boxes), all in logarithms, M12=0 in 2019 . NBER-defined recession peak-to-trough dates are in gray.Source: BLS, via FRED, and Atlanta Fed Salary TrackerNBER, and author's calculations.
Since the graph is on a logarithmic scale, you can see from the CPS data that real median wages are growing at about the same rate as the leisure and hospitality industry, and faster than the growth rate for all private sector production and non-managerial workers. .
