Median wage growth is steady at around 3.6% over the last 3M. Some signs over the past year that the recent re-acceleration may be over. /1 
The weakness in IT wage growth may have turned a corner, but on the other hand manufacturing and construction wage growth has been softening a bit. /2
Moreover, if you squint you can see a recent upturn in the share of workers not getting a nominal raise. This could be concerning, though note this share also rose from late 2016 to 2017 even while the labor market continued to expand. /3
Small upticks in non-raise rates in manufacturing, construction, and leisure / hospitality. /4
Chair Powell mentioned yesterday he thought there was still slack in the US labor market. One likely candidate for the source of such slack is disability nonparticipation: it's still elevated by about 1/2 a percent of the prime-age population, but it's also falling robustly. /5
Prime-age women are already above their 2000 employment rates, adjusted for age and race/ethnicity. But we'd need to employ another 1.5 million prime-age men to get their employment rates back to 2000 levels. /6
I believe with good policy and continued labor market headwinds we can close a great deal of that aggregate gap for prime-age men and extend the gains for women. But note that some nonemployment margins for men have barely budged or even risen in the recovery. /7
For example, home/family care is now the single biggest nonemployment margin for men relative to where they were in 2000, & it's been structurally rising for decades now (while falling sharply for women since 2000). School enrollment has also been stubborn for both sexes. /8
So even if and when we get employment rates back up to historic levels, it's likely that both employment and nonemployment are going to look different than they have in the past. /FIN
