The January 2022 Wage Report

A big concern with (price) inflation is if (compensation) inflation is keeping up. If it is, workers are better off. If not, they're not.†

A big component of compensation is measured by the official statistic "average hourly earnings" which also came out at the end of last week. You can find it on FRED if you're curious.

In The Wall Street Journal editorial entitled "The Wages of Inflation" they mention the January number:

The number worth pondering is the increase of 0.7% in average hourly earnings in the month. That’s a barn-burner number—9.2% at an annual rate.

Now you know how they got that.

They follow this with:

Hourly wages are up 5.7% over the last 12 months

You should also recognize how they do that, and why. It's because it's not clear that the 9.2% will be sustained over 12 months, but the 5.7% has been sustained over 12 months.

N.B. I wasn't able to exactly duplicate these numbers from a quick download, but I got with a tenth of a percent or two. Small enough for me to think I used a slightly different data set, or one of us made a tiny math mistake.

† Do note that in media and political discussions about whether or not workers are keeping up, they're unusually selective in choosing a measure of compensation that justifies that position they intend to take. For example, compensation includes healthcare benefits. Suppose their price is inflating faster than other goods in the CPI. Then there's probably a component of compensation that roughly matches that — but then everything else in compensation (like wages) will grow at a lower rate. And this is where you have to be careful: the next step is to compare (price) inflation including healthcare to (wage) inflation excluding healthcare, note that the former is larger, and assert that workers are falling behind. That is not clear from that position, and isn't even discernible due to the apples and oranges comparison, but the assertion is what will stick in peoples' minds.