Slinging drinks and lattes may be a better path to pay raises than pounding keys in a cubicle, according to a new analysis.
Bankrate released a new report that found that some service workers — like bartenders and baristas — are earning raises faster than and at higher-rates than their counterparts working in white-collar jobs.
According to Bankrate’s data, wages for hospitality workers have increased by nearly 30 percent since 2021, and increases are outpacing inflation by more than 4 percent. The same goes for workers in health care, where their raises have outpaced inflation and their salaries have increased by approximately 25 percent since 2021.
Workers in white-collar jobs — business and professional services and finance — as well as educators have seen little in the way of wage growth, and certainly not enough to keep up with inflation.
Teachers in particular are struggling, with their pay increases trending about 5 percent below inflation.
White collar workers still tend to make more per paycheck than their counterparts in hospitality — and they tend to have benefits as well, which isn’t always the case for baristas and bartenders — but that gap is closing.
Moving jobs is typically the best way to secure a raise in the modern job market, but that’s also become difficult for white-collar workers. Fewer businesses are hiring, and as AI tools become more ubiquitous across industries, some experts — like Amazon CEO Andy Jassy — expect that even fewer white-collar jobs will exist.
“It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” Jassy said in a memo to employees earlier this year.
Ford Motors CEO Jim Farley went so far as to predict that half of all white-collar workers in the U.S. will be replaced by AI tools.
The hardest hit from the current white-collar hiring freeze and low wage increases are new graduates trying to land their first post-college jobs, Bankrate predicts.
Unemployment among recent computer science graduates is more than double that of art history majors, according to Investors Business Daily. According to an analysis by New York Fed, recent college graduates had a 4.8 percent unemployment rate in June, which is 4.2 percent above the overall workforce.
