For White-Collar Workers, It’s Prime Time to Get a Big Raise
Pay increases for people in business and professional sectors are starting to outpace gains for lower-wage workers
The Wall Street Journal reached out to respected legal staffing legend Chere Estrin to find out what’s happening in the legal sector:
WSJ article By Sarah Chaney Cambon
ET
White-collar professionals are reaping big pay gains as worker bargaining power spreads across the U.S. economy and shows early signs of durability.
Wall Street banks are boosting compensation for employees. Consumer lenders are seeing their biggest pay bumps in more than a decade. Legal firms are raising wages aggressively as burned-out workers flee the industry.
Pay for finance, information and professional employees rose 4.4% in January from a year earlier, outpacing 4% wage growth for all workers, according to the Atlanta Fed’s wage tracker.Workers in higher-wage sectors experienced the fastest month-over-month earnings growth in January, Labor Department data showed. Wages in the professional and business services sector—which includes jobs in management, law and engineering—rose 0.8% in January from a month earlier. That was well above a 0.1% wage increase in leisure and hospitality.

“For most of last year, wage growth was really strong for lots of low-wage workers,” said Nick Bunker, economist at jobs site Indeed. “Now, the overall labor market is just tighter and that is boosting the bargaining power of the rest of the workforce.”Workers like Andrew Eberle are benefiting. Mr. Eberle, 30 years old, started a remote business analyst job in the Phoenix area in mid-2020, shortly before he graduated from a master’s degree program in analytics. He said he enjoyed that position but was spending a lot of time refreshing Excel charts; he wanted a position where he could more deeply analyze and visualize data.
With the price increases, some individuals are coming out ahead even though many aren’t. For instance, workers who switch jobs in finance, accounting, technology and legal are often seeing pay raises that exceed inflation, said Paul McDonald, senior executive director at professional staffing firm Robert Half.
Mr. Eberle’s pay increase of nearly 20% is outpacing costs for many services, allowing him to spend on travel—including a recent trip to the Oregon coast with his wife—and other experiences.
“I feel like we have wiggle room to do things—to go out to eat dinner, to have date nights or go on weekend trips—and not feel crunched,” he said.
Still, Mr. Eberle is holding off on buying a car and isn’t putting a down payment on a house as prices surge. Mr. Eberle also noticed the $70 cost to fill up the tank of his Jeep Grand Cherokee is much higher than it used to be.