Based on a post from yesterday, I thought it might be helpful for everyone to graph out exactly what’s been going on with Washington state employee pay over the years.

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This first chart shows inflation in blue, general wage adjustments in green, and median household income in WA in grey, over the past 25 years. Cumulative inflation since 1999 has been about 86.6%—that is, $186 today would give you the same purchasing power as $100 in 1999. Wage adjustments, however, totaled only about 53% (this is not including the 3% we will receive next month). The gap between the green and blue lines is how much state worker salaries have declined in real terms. Over the same period of time the median household income in Washington has grown 106% (not adjusting for inflation, of course). Which is to say, state employee salaries have been growing at about half the rate of salaries overall.

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In the second chart, I created a normalized baseline value of dollars over time (the zero percent line). The blue line shows how much pay has increased or decreased relative to that baseline. It shows that state worker salaries have lost about 18% of their value—mostly between 2010-2013 and again from 2021-2023.

I hope these charts are helpful for people to understand why worker pay feels so bad. We are losing our place economically in both relative and absolute terms. And a final note, I’m not real a financial guy, so if you think I got something wrong in my analysis please correct me in the comments. I would have liked to include a measure of how much the cost of living has changed in Washington specifically, rather than relying on national inflation data, but I was doing this pretty quickly. If there's interest maybe I can do a follow-up down the line.

EDIT: With data u/ArlesChatless pointed me to, I expanded the charts back to 1989. They tell basically the same story, but worse. Basically this has been a trend for at least 35 years. You can find those updated charts here and here.