Pay is finally increasing for low-wage workers, according to new reports.
Ten years after the Great Recession, the US Labor Department on Friday announced that average hourly earnings had topped 3% growth year-over-year for the ninth straight month. Recently, wage growth has been highest for the lowest 25% of earners, in part because of minimum-wage hikes.
The wage growth is also most likely being sparked by a tightening labor market, which is forcing employers of even the lowest-paid workers to raise pay or risk losing their staff to the competition, according to the economist Ernie Tedeschi.
Some of the jobs most benefitting from the wage increases have included bartenders, truck drivers, and cashiers, according to a separate Glassdoor Job Market Report. The report, released Tuesday, provides month-to-month insight on job openings and pay changes using data from the website.
"Job openings are like a crystal ball into employer expectations of the US economy," Daniel Zhao, a senior economist at Glassdoor, said in a release. "Employers can open or close job postings instantly in response to fast-changing economic trends or world events."
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The report found that job openings in the US had fallen slightly from last year, indicating a "slowing labor market," Zhao said. Wages increased 1.4% year-over-year in April across all industries, according to Glassdoor data.
While the jobs that experienced the fastest pay growth tended to ones that paid low, jobs in manufacturing, like machine and material operators, also experienced wage growth despite projections that the industry would suffer from President Donald Trump's tariffs on Chinese products.
Here are the jobs that saw wages increase the most year-over-year in April:
