Business
Commentary: Claiming a historic gain in blue-collar wage growth, Trump shows how to use statistics to mislead
You may have seen an eye-opening statement recently from the Trump White House crowing about its success in pushing up “blue-collar wage growth.”
The statement was headlined: “Blue-Collar Wage Growth Sees Largest Increase in Nearly 60 Years Under Trump.” It purported to track real wages for hourly workers during Trump’s first five months in office, and compared that figure to the first five months in office of Trump’s predecessors.
“We’re just getting started with pro-growth, pro-prosperity policies that finally put America First,” the White House boasted.
A really strong economy was handed off to the Trump administration, and so far, it has mostly held.
— Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute
There are enough questions about how the White House arrived at this conclusion, and why anyone should trust it, to mark it as a sterling demonstration of how to employ cherry-picking to lie with statistics.
In conjunction with the announcement, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave a preening interview to the New York Post, a Trump-friendly daily that repeated the claim without examination. He also appeared on a New York Post podcast to promote the administration’s purportedly near-record-setting achievement.
Bessent didn’t disclose the administration’s methodology, or explain what the first five months of a presidential term was supposed to reveal, so I had to parse the data myself, with the crucial assistance of some professional economists. More on that in a moment.
The basis for Trump’s claim is a government statistic tracking inflation-adjusted hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees in the private sector, pegged to prices in 1982-1984.
The workers tend to be rank-and-file employees, though economic analysts Philippa Dunne and Doug Henwood of TLRAnalytics note that it’s a stretch to call them “blue-collar.” The term customarily applies to laborers, not “bartenders, teachers, or retail workers” whose earnings are also tracked by the statistic.
Trump cited wage growth from Jan. 1 through May 31 this year. As it happens, however, Trump wasn’t president for that entire period; he took office on Jan. 20, so at least some of his claim covered the last three weeks of the Biden administration.
In other words, some of what Trump bragged about was the work of Biden — the strength of whose economy spilled over into Trump’s term. (Trumpworld hasn’t been shy about blaming Biden for economic problems that have bubbled up over the last few months, so it’s a bit churlish of him to deny Biden credit for this.)
Indeed, one important question related to Trump’s claim goes to what he has actually done that would produce wage gains on this scale. The answer is: nothing. The likelihood is that whatever phenomenon is measurable at this point in the year reflects the Biden economy.
“A really strong economy was handed off to the Trump administration,” says Josh Bivens, chief economist at the labor-affiliated Economic Policy Institute, “and so far, it has mostly held.”
In the New York Post podcast, Bessent attributed the purported wage gains to Trump’s “emphasis on manufacturing,” along with “12 or 20 million illegal aliens coming out of the workforce.”
In neither category, however, have Trump policies actually achieved anything solid. Manufacturing output, as measured by the Federal Reserve, fell in three of the first five months of this year, following a powerful gain in December, the last full month of the Biden administration. As of May, U.S. manufacturing is operating at a slightly lower percent of capacity than it was in December.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that manufacturing employment fell by 8,000 in May, by 2,000 over the three months ending in May, and by 9,000 over the six months ending in May. If there’s a renaissance in manufacturing jobs attributable to Trump industrial policy, it’s not visible in the official numbers.
Bessent’s statement about the millions of “illegal aliens” coming out of the workforce is especially chimerical. Authoritative estimates place the total of undocumented residents in the U.S. at about 11 million to 11.7 million. Unless Bessent thinks that every one of them is no longer in the workforce, he misspoke. (I am being charitable).
Immigration and Customs Enforcement itself claims to have deported 65,000 immigrants in the first 100 days of Trump’s term, ended April 29. To assert that taking those individuals out of the workforce was enough to have triggered a surge in hourly wages for legal residents is absurd.
That’s especially so because many undocumented workers take jobs that employers find difficult, if not impossible, to fill from among legal residents.
Annualized five-month wage growth has been stronger in 12 of the last 32 months — including a long period during Biden’s term — than in Trump’s first five months (circled).
(Josh Bivens, Economic Policy Institute)
As Amy Taxin and Dorany Pineda of the Associated Press reported, in some parts of California’s agricultural belt as many as 45% of farmworkers have stopped coming to work since federal agents launched sweeping raids on farms and other locations employing immigrants. The construction industry also has suffered from a dwindling supply of immigrant workers, with few legally present workers available to replace them.
A fundamental question about the White House claim is why it chose to measure itself against the first five months of previous administrations. Why not the first five months of all presidential terms? Or any other five-month period?
I asked the White House and Treasury Department to comment on the administration’s statistic. I got no answer from the White House and nothing on the record from Treasury.
The time frame cited by the White House is curiously selective. The historical comparison to the first five months of one-term presidents and the first terms of two-term presidents doesn’t apply to Trump: “This is Trump’s second term, so he’s not really a member of this club,” observe Dunne and Henwood.
They note, further, that the five-month annualized gain in worker wages is “a silly metric.” The statistic is notoriously volatile, and averaging such a short period only exacerbates its ephemerality.
Judging from five-month annualized averages over time, moreover, “Trump’s 1.7% is high, but not eye-popping,” Dunne and Henwood told me.
They’re right. Going back to October 2022, the five-month average was higher than Trump’s in 12 of the last 32 months. That includes five months of Biden’s term — July through October 2024. The highest annualized five-month gain in real average hourly wages was recorded in September 2024, when it reached about 3.2%.
What makes the question especially pertinent is that, with a few notable exceptions, little of significance happens in the first five months of a new presidential term. It takes time for newly-elected presidents to assemble their cabinet, cue up a legislative program, address the problems — or coast on the economic health — bequeathed them by their predecessors.
Obama’s first term was consumed with undoing the damage of the Great Recession, which was a product largely of Republican economic policymaking. During his term, Biden had to deal with the consequences of the COVID pandemic.
It’s proper to recognize that even assembling the statistics that the Trump administration decided to torture for its news release may become more difficult in the future. That’s because Trump is taking a hatchet to the government’s economic data infrastructure.
Several datasets have been deleted from federal websites. Budget cuts and mass firings will hobble data collection, and expert advisory committees serving the Census Bureau, BLS and Bureau of Economic Analysis have been disbanded. The result of these and other assaults, wrote Jed Kolko, a former undersecretary for economic affairs at the Commerce Department overseeing data operations at the Census Bureau and BEA, will include the destruction of trust in U.S. economic data.
“Governments hide or manipulate the numbers only when they’re bad, as Argentina did with inflation, Greece with public finances, and China with its youth unemployment rate,” Kolko wrote.
The consequences will extend beyond government agencies. “In the private sector, businesses use federal statistics for investment and marketing decisions,” Kolko added. “Official statistics on population growth, housing conditions, local demographics, and local spending patterns drive decisions about where to build factories, open stores, locate jobs, and construct housing. … Financial markets trade on macroeconomic releases, and investors rely on clear, confident signals from the Federal Reserve, which itself depends on trustworthy economic data.”
Trump may not realize that he’s playing with fire by crowing about what could be an ephemeral gain in an obscure statistic. Many economists expect the initiatives he is pursuing to produce a slowdown in economic growth, or even a recession. Corporate executives’ uncertainties about Trump’s tariff policies have already stifled industrial planning, including decisions about when and where to build new factories.
That won’t be positive for wage growth, obviously. Do Trump or Bessent care? One would hope so, but the evidence that they do hasn’t appeared anywhere but in this White House news release. If things turn sour, what will they have to brag about?
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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Politicians in Washington and the reporters who cover them have an often adversarial relationship.
But on the last Saturday in April, they gather for an irreverent celebration of press freedom and the First Amendment at the Washington Hilton Hotel: The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.
Hosted by the association, an organization that helps ensure access for media outlets covering the presidency, the dinner attracts Hollywood stars; politicians from both parties; and representatives of more than 100 networks, newspapers, magazines and wire services.
While The Times will have two reporters in the ballroom covering the event, the company no longer buys seats at the party, said Richard W. Stevenson, the Washington bureau chief. The decision goes back almost two decades; the last dinner The Times attended as an organization was in 2007.
“We made a judgment back then that the event had become too celebrity-focused and was undercutting our need to demonstrate to readers that we always seek to maintain a proper distance from the people we cover, many of whom attend as guests,” he said.
It’s a decision, he added, that “we have stuck by through both Republican and Democratic administrations, although we support the work of the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
Susan Wessling, The Times’s Standards editor, said the policy is a product of the organization’s desire to maintain editorial independence.
“We don’t want to leave readers with any questions about our independence and credibility by seeming to be overly friendly with people whose words and actions we need to report on,” she said.
The celebrity mentalist Oz Pearlman is headlining the evening, in lieu of the usual comedy set by the likes of Stephen Colbert and Hasan Minhaj, but all eyes will be on President Trump, who will make his first appearance at the dinner as president.
Mr. Trump has boycotted the event since 2011, when he was the butt of punchlines delivered by President Barack Obama and the talk show host Seth Meyers mocking his hair, his reality TV show and his preoccupation with the “birther” movement.
Last month, though, Mr. Trump, who has a contentious relationship with the media, announced his intention to attend this year’s dinner, where he will speak to a room full of the same reporters he often derides as “enemies of the people.”
Times reporters will be there to document the highs, the lows and the reactions in the room. A reporter for the Styles desk has also been assigned to cover the robust roster of after-parties around Washington.
Some off-duty reporters from The Times will also be present at this late-night circuit, though everyone remains cognizant of their roles, said Patrick Healy, The Times’s assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust.
“If they’re reporting, there’s a notebook or recorder out as usual,” he said. “If they’re not, they’re pros who know they’re always identifiable as Times journalists.”
For most of The Times’s reporters and editors, though, the evening will be experienced from home.
“The rest of us will be able to follow the coverage,” Mr. Stevenson said, “without having to don our tuxes or gowns.”
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