Washington state workers finally get good pay bump, but housing costs soar twice as fast
Workers across Washington and the Seattle area finally got a good pay hike last year, and yet it didn’t amount to much compared with the state’s soaring cost of housing, which led the nation last year.
The state Employment Security Department reported Wednesday that the average worker across the state made $58,957 in 2016, up 4.8 percent from a year earlier. The raise amounts to an extra $2,684 annually per person, before taxes.
It represented the largest bump in wages since 2007. It follows relatively weak pay growth of 2.6 percent in 2015, and beats the average wage increase of 3.4 percent over the last 10 years.
The biggest pay growth was in retail trade (up 19.9 percent), the information sector (up 5.8 percent) and real estate (up 5.2 percent).
Read more: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/economy/washington-workers-finally-get-good-pay-bump-but-housing-costs-soar-twice-as-fast/
= new reply since forum marked as read
