Adjunct Professor Salaries in San Antonio, TX Salary estimated from 101 employees, users, and past and present job advertisements on Indeed in the past 24 months. Last updated: December 22, 2017
Causes of Wage Stagnation. Over the last 35 years (with the exception of the late 1990s), hourly wages of the vast majority have lagged far behind economy-wide productivity. This failure of wages to grow and rising wage inequality is the primary explanation for the rise of family income stagnation and income inequality over the past generation.
One reason is that, with a higher wage, workers stay on the job longer, thus increasing labor efficiency and decreasing the cost of recruitment and retraining. Another is that two-thirds of minimum wage workers are employed by large businesses, which can easily afford higher wages (though they'd rather not pay them). Wal-Mart, for example, had $469 billion in sales and $17 billion in profits in 2012. The number of jobs, however, is not really the crucial issue.