Wage growth expected to be minimal

Published November 20, 2013 by Jessica Sabbath

Private-sector workers in the U.S. are likely to see only a small — if any — gain in wages this year, according to Bloomberg BNA.

The publisher’s fourth-quarter Wage Trend Indicator (WTI) held steady, matching the third-quarter WTI.

“The labor market is still showing positive momentum, but we're not drawing down our pool of unemployed workers very quickly,” economist Kathryn Kobe, a consultant who maintains and helped develop Bloomberg BNA's WTI database, said in a statement. “As a result, the upward pressure on wages is too weak to accelerate the overall rate of wage increases.”

The WTI forecasts whether the rate of wage growth is accelerating or decelerating but not the size of pay increases. Over the past two-and-a-half years, the WTI has fluctuated between 98.47 and 98.75, with no clear trend up or down.