Pay for new hires is falling in some blue-collar jobs

Some jobs just don’t pay what they used to.

Data from ZipRecruiter shows the wages employers are offering new hires in several blue-collar sectors of the labor market have declined this year from 2023, with retail wages falling the most by 55.9%, followed by agriculture (-24.5%), manufacturing (-17.3%) and transportation (-13.9%).

“Average posted pay has risen since last year, both overall and in most job categories,” ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak told FOX Business. “But trends have diverged across different parts of the economy, with growth picking up in white-collar sectors, and slowing down in blue-collar sectors.”

Pollak says part of this is post-pandemic economic normalization and mean reversion, but part of it is due to the steep hiring slowdown that has taken place in the private sector outside of the healthcare industry.

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“Several other indicators also show that competition for talent has eased,” the economist said. “For example, the spread between wage growth for job switchers and job stayers was as large as 2.8 percentage points in August 2022, but has since fallen to just 0.5 percentage points (according to the Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker).”

ZipRecruiter’s latest New Hires Survey shows that new hires are not only getting smaller raises but also fewer signing bonuses, fewer attractive counteroffers, and fewer inbound queries from recruiters, Pollak noted.

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Darrin Carr, the founder of Carr Talent Acquisition, says his firm has noticed the trend, too.

“In the last weeks and months we’ve seen offers and wages drop in many thousands of job postings,” Carr told FOX Business, saying he has seen the declines for both white-collar and blue-collar positions – and across all sizes of companies.

Carr said he has also noticed a trend of employers starting to only hire new people in cities or regions where lower costs of living will correlate with reduced income, and noted that there is a movement toward eliminating positions filled in recent years which have higher salaries, and replacing them with cheaper 1099 contractors.

He said employers have the upper hand again, in many cases.

“People are less picky now about their work than they were just 6 months ago as many are scared,” Carr said in his own assessment of the situation. “They need a job, or a better job to pay the increasing bills and they don’t have the negotiating leverage they did a while ago.”