Jobs only seem hot, and that's why wages are sluggish

If you smooth out for monthly gyrations and take a 3-month average, the number of jobs increased by 140,000, well below the 211,000 during the same months in 2018, and the least in two years.

And wages are not rising as they should if you believe in the law of supply and demand, along with historical trends, which say they should be increasing at a fast clip since employers should be robustly competing to grab workers.

Instead, the year-over-year real average annual wage increase of 1.6% is far below the rates of 4% and more marked month after month just prior to the Great Recession.

Nominally, writes Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, manufacturing wages rose an average of 2.5% over the year. But when you factor in lower weekly hours, the increase was just 1%, below inflation.