#wage stagnation

#wage stagnation

If starting a family, buying a house, or just thinking about purchasing a car feels impossible-you're definitely not alone. What used to define "middle class" feels further out of reach for Millennials and Gen Z than ever before. Rising costs, stagnant wages, and where you live all play huge roles in whether big life milestones feel doable-or merely like dreams. So has the middle class actually disappeared, or is it just morphing into something new?

As a result, many are wondering what the relationship is between AI's rise and labor's stagnation. While economists like Daron Acemoglu argue that any impact AI has on workers won't be felt for a decade - if it comes at all - tech CEOs are telling a different story: that AI is about to flip our whole world upside down.

Many CFOs now rank talent-whether hiring, retention, or skill gaps-as their companies' top internal risk. And "polyworking," where employees hold multiple jobs or roles at once to make ends meet, shows no signs of slowing. Polyworking is likely to continue into 2026, according to Vicki Salemi, a career expert at Monster, the job search and recruiting platform. She points to a recent polywork survey showing that nearly one in two workers hold multiple jobs simultaneously.

In the wake of the Great Recession, which lasted from December 2007 to June 2009, home prices fell precipitously, bottoming out in February 2011 at 25% lower than the pre-recession high reported in July 2006, according to the Case-Shiller index. Plunging home values left millions of Americans hesitant to invest in a home and led to a sharp decline in the number of skilled laborers in the homebuilding sector.

US President Donald Trump's tariff policies, imposing levies as high as 50% on the United States' trading partners, have not proven compatible with his campaign promise to turn the US back into a "manufacturing powerhouse," as Friday's jobs report showed. The overall analysis was grim, with the economy adding just 22,000 jobs last month, but manufacturing employment in particular has declined since Trump made his April 2 "Liberation Day" announcement of tariffs on countries including Canada and Mexico.