Annual wage increases for private-sector employees are expected to remain fairly static in the foreseeable future.
That's the word from Wage Trend Indicators by Bloombery BNA, a publisher of specialized news and information.
In the first three months of this year, the WTI index, a benchmark that identifies turning points in private-sector wage trends, inched up to 98.73 from 98.52 in the fourth quarter of 2012. The WTI index has moved between 98.47 and 98.75 during the last seven quarters.
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"Labor market indicators recently have been very mixed," said Kathryn Kobe, economist and consultant who maintains and helped develop Bloomberg BNA's WTI database. "We're not seeing the robust growth in the economy that's needed to boost wages."
According to Kobe, little to no change is expected regarding the pace of annual wage gains among the private sector from the 1.7 percent increase seen in 2012, which was measured by the Department of Labor's employment cost index. The WTI only projects the direction of wage growth, not the magnitude.
Continual growth in the WTI suggests more pressure to increase private-sector wages, and a steady drop predicts a slowdown of the rate of wage increases.
Four of WTI's seven components represent positive contributions to the final first-quarter reading, which is indicative of a mixed economic environment. The positive contributors include the number of employers with trouble filling professional and technical jobs, average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers, the unemployment rate, and industrial production. Meanwhile, the three negative factors are rate of inflation, those who lost their jobs as a share of the labor force, and the number of employers planning to hire production and service workers soon.
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