"Employer costs for employee compensation" is yet another estimate of worker pay from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's based on a quarterly survey of 35,000 observations from 8,500 establishments. For some reason, federal workers aren't included. Here are results through the second quarter of 2023, adjusted for inflation:
In addition to wages, total comp includes health insurance, retirement, vacation pay, employer costs for Social Security and Medicare, and overtime.
Either way—total comp or just wages—the average worker earns less today than in the final quarter before the pandemic started.
Comparing Q2 to Q1 of this year, wages were down at an annual rate of 1.6% while total comp was down 2.7%. This is a sign that the recent uptick in wages may be leveling off.
It's not "a sign that the recent uptick in wages may be leveling off", it's evidence that real compensation is lower than it was before the pandemic. If there was an actual uptick, it has been gone for well over a year. But we know that the jump in wages in 2020 was a compositional effect, due to layoff of the lowest-paid workers, so the uptick was at least partly artificial.
Average weekly earnings, from the same (establishment) survey, seems to show some improvement in real wages:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=18Mc7
But by any measure, for over a year wages have not been increasing faster than they were during the time up to 2021 when inflation was low. Wages are in no way a threat to cause inflation now, and they were not a major factor in the recent inflation.
The wages are per hour, and average hours worked has increased. More hours worked lowers costs of some fringe benefits, e.g. health care. And there's the mix of employees to consider--lower end employees make less per hour and typically have little by the way of fringe benefits--especially at small firms.
What do you mean "may be leveling off"? I look at this chart and see deception. There's a slow, steady decline in real wages (because inflation has been decoupled from wage increases for a while now...) over the time shown in the chart. The spike/plateau isn't even that much of a spike - it represent an increase of a whopping 3% for wages/salaries. That's basically nothing. It's even less than that for total compensation, with an increase of about 2.25-2.5%.
These economy wide averages obscure the demographic and job mix changes that occur in the workforce over time.
Given the large difference in wages for different demographics and types of jobs, its possible to see this chart moving downward even if every group of workers is seeing improvement.
Since 2018 weve seen strong employment (# of jobs) growth in low wage sectors, little growth in high wage sectors.
Since 2018 we have seen the amount of workers in their peak earning years shrink but growth in the number of elderly workers and very young workers. Fewer white workers, more minority workers.
Given these changes, the chart is very....opaque.
You only need to look at the sudden, massive improvement in 2020 to understand that these charts might not be very useful.