By Nick Gale, WLS-AM 890 News
(WASHINGTON) — U.S. employers slowed their hiring in July, adding 157,000 jobs. While that is a solid gain, it is below the pace they maintained in the first half of this year.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration say employers should be attracting American workers through wage increases. Average hourly earnings are up 2.7 percent year over year but wage growth has been slow to arrive. With inflation running at about a 2 percent rate, there isn’t a lot of wiggle room financially for many Americans according to Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate.com.
“The tax cut has obviously given workers better take home pay,” Hamrick tells WLS. “I would argue that there has been a bit of a shell game played with that rhetorically to the extent that, just from a dollars and cents standpoint, the bulk of the tax cut has gone to shareholders, company buy backs, much more robust than what the pay pass through has been, but you take what you an get at this point.”
Meanwhile the unemployment rate ticked down from 4.0 percent from 3.9 percent.
Copyright 2018 WLS-AM News
