Many U.S. workers are seeing bigger paychecks in pandemic era, but gains aren’t spread evenly

The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping the U.S. labor market more than any single event since at least the Great Recession of 2007-09 and the financial panic that accompanied it. Employers shed nearly 20 million jobs between March and April 2020, according to government data, and payroll employment has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels. Workers are quitting their jobs at a record pace, particularly in lower-paid sectors such as retail and food service, and many employers are scrambling to lure replacements with raises and bonuses.

At least, that’s the broad picture. But those wage gains have been distributed unevenly throughout the workforce, with workers in some sectors and industries seeing far smaller gains than those in others. And workers’ real purchasing power has been eroded by sharply higher inflation. (This analysis focuses on average weekly wages and employment levels in the private sector, where around 85% of Americans work.)

Almost two-thirds of U.S. private sector payroll workers (63.6%) work in industries where the average weekly wage in the second quarter of 2021 was at least 5% higher than it was in the second quarter of 2020, according to the most recently available data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, a product of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.