Breaking down wage growth by earnings bracket
The top earners keep earning. Those with the highest wages are experiencing the fastest wage growth, seeing an almost 20 percent change since 2000. From 2000 to 2016, the 95th-percentile wage grew four times faster than wages for the bottom 70 percent of wage earners, according to the EPI.
“What we’re seeing is a continuation of the trend we’ve seen really in the last 30, 40 years,” Gould said. “The pulling apart of the wage distribution where workers at the very top are the ones that are seeing the gains to a growing economy.”
But despite the uneven gains happening with workers, Gould argues that we could see some trends reverse. The unemployment rate has come down very sharply after the recession. “As that happens, we will see that translate into more broad-based wage growth. We saw that most strongly in the late 1990s and 2000,” she said.