The cost of hiring new employees and retaining existing ones in the nation’s tight labor market is growing at nearly its fastest pace in a generation. That is helping to fuel inflation as employers pass labor costs to customers.
The U.S. employment-cost index—a quarterly measure of wages and benefits paid by employers—is expected to show that costs continued to rise at the highest rate in two decades of available records. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expect a seasonally adjusted increase of 1.2% in the fourth quarter of 2021 over the prior three months, which experienced a similar increase. The third-quarter gain, when compared with the same quarter from a year earlier, rose 3.7% on a nonseasonally adjusted basis.
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