>Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> A better measure might be the
>> number of hours it takes the average U.S. worker to earn the
>> equivalent of a barrel of crude (since you avoid all the
>> complications of price indexes); it was 5.25 at the 1980 peak, vs.
>> 2.56 in May 2004.
>>
>
>For those of us who mistrust (and/or don't really understand) the
>concept of "average u.s. worker," would it be possible to calculate the
>following:
>
>How many hours of work in 1980 and now would it take a worker earning
>(say) the minimum wage + 15%?
>
>Would that be (roughly) the same as for the "average worker"? I presume
>the figure (if available) would be distorted by the fact that minimum
>wage & inflation don't track very well. But it seems like all such
>comparative figures are distorted in one way or another.
Well of course. Everything's selective and distorted. But the "average" U.S. worker is my shorthand for the average hourly wage for nonsupervisory private sector workers published every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics <http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t16.htm>. Since it excludes supervisory workers, who generally make more money than nonsupervisory workers, the figure is hardly skewed upwards. By contrast, a worker making 115% of the minimum wage would be below the 10th percentile of hourly earnings, and isn't really representative of anything except the really low-paid.
Doug