Is The New York Times Right That "The only time in the past four decades when after-inflation wages bounded upward was from 1998 to 2001, when the jobless rate fell below 4.5 percent."

See The Mystery of the Vanishing Pay Raise by STEVEN GREENHOUSE. That implies that the gain in wages was greater than the CPI increase in only 3 or 4 years. But I found 17 years when that happened from 1976-2009 (the BLS file I found that had annual wages only went up through 2009). That means there were 17 years when it was the opposite.

I calculated the average annual increase in hourly wages and compared that to the increase in the average CPI each year. The table below shows the annual percentage change in both wages and prices. Wages outpaced inflation every year from 1996-2003. Links to my data sources are after the table.

The three worst years for workers were 1979-81, when the inflation rate was 3.48, 5.46 and 1.69 percentage points higher than the increase in average hourly earnings. In 2009, wages were 2.36 times higher than they were in 1982. The CPI was 2.22 times higher. So going back to 1975 brings in those really bad years for workers when we had very high inflation rates (from 1979-81 those rates were 11.3%, 13.5%, and 10.3%).




Data on wages

CPI data