- Over the last year, millions of workers have been quitting for new roles and higher pay.
- A new survey finds that the minimum salary workers will accept for a new job is nearly $73,000.
Even as the labor market and economy incrementally cool off, workers still say they won't take a new job that pays below $70,000.
A July survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York tracks workers' expectations and the wages they're currently being paid. The survey finds that the reservation wage — which is the lowest average wage survey respondents would accept for a new role — came in at $72,873.
That's well above the $68,954 that workers said they needed to be offered in July 2021, and just a dash below the series high of $73,283 in March 2022. In other words, workers still say that employers need to offer them wages well above pre-pandemic pay to get them onboard — something that employers say has been a consistent challenge, with anecdotal stories of labor shortages still popping up across the economy.
That doesn't mean that workers are necessarily getting paid that much, though. According to the survey, the average full-time job offer wage received in the past four month was $60,764, a slight downtick from March 2022's average offer of $64,104.
Even as the economy seems to slow a bit, the numbers show that workers still have high expectations — likely due to a confluence of forces, including a reckoning over the true value of labor, skyrocketing inflation, and employers still struggling to hire. And, despite fears of a recession and some layoffs across the workforce, more workers were indeed job switching in July: 4.1% said they were with a new employer, compared to 3.4% in March.
That comes after 4.2 million people quit their jobs in June, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Workers still have lots of job opportunities right now. They have more bargaining power than they've had in the recent past," Nick Bunker, economic research director at Indeed Hiring Lab, previously told Insider in reference to those June quits figures.
All of that suggests that the Great Resignation is still very much in full swing, and is proving fruitful for workers; according to the survey, average earnings on the whole have been ticking up over the last few months, with workers making an average of $75,964.
However, those gains aren't being felt equally. Women continue to be less employed than men, with far fewer actively working or looking for work. And Black workers continue to see higher unemployment rates, as fewer of them actively work or look for work.