Over the past year, pay has picked up most markedly for workers in the leisure and hospitality industry, climbing by 14.9 percent, while workers in transportation and warehousing have also received double-digit pay gains. Those figures are for workers who are not supervisors.
Between February and March, wages climbed markedly in leisure and hospitality once again, while workers in the financial and durable goods industries also saw pay pick up sharply.
While rapid wage growth is a boon for many workers, it is complicated by — and raising concerns about — rapid inflation. Workers are finding that their paychecks, while bigger, no longer buy as much. At the same time, fast pay increases may be prodding some employers to raise prices as they try to pass higher labor costs along to their customers.
“The promise of wages moving up is a great thing,” Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said after the central bank’s decision to raise interest rates last month in a bid to cool off the economy. But the increases are “running at levels that are well above what would be consistent with 2 percent inflation, our goal, over time.”
With March’s figures, wages are increasing at an even faster rate over the year than they were when Mr. Powell made his remark.