Half of American Workers Make Less Than $27,000 a Year…Worst in 12 Years

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Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Half of American Workers Make Less Than $27,000 a Year…Worst in 12 Years

Here’s another economic marker that helps explain the desperation so many Americans feel these days: half of all wage earners in 2010 made less than $26,364.

This comes out to $507 a week, the lowest level (after adjusting for inflation) since 1999, according to David Cay Johnson at Reuters, using figures from the Medicare Tax Database.

If there’s a positive side to this reality, it’s that these workers at least have jobs. For about 10 million work-eligible Americans, that’s not the case at all.

Since 2007, when the Great Recession began, the U.S. workforce has shed 5.2 million employees. In addition, another 4.5 million new workers (a product of population growth) would like to have jobs, if they existed.

The numbers from 2010 were rosy for some, namely the extremely wealthy. The total number of individuals earning more than $1 million increased by 20% over 2009, from 78,000 to 94,000.

-Noel Brinkerhoff

First Look at US Pay Data, It’s Awful (by David Cay Johnson, Reuters)

50% of All Workers Made Less than $26,000 in 2010 (by Derek Thompson, The Atlantic)

Wage Statistics for 2010 (Social Security Administration)

Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007 (Congressional Budget Office) (pdf)

Family Income Has Plunged Since the “End of the Recession” (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Income Inequality in U.S. Reaches Record High (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)