Welcome to the labor force!  Now get up there to the register and earn your $7.25 an hour!To you it may just be a job flipping burgers, but to economists that job is your ticket into the civil...

We (the People of the United States) used to be an agrarian economy, meaning that most of what we produced (our gross domestic product or GDP) was farm stuff. Corn. Cotton. Eggs. Dead mea...

Classical economists argue that wages—the price of labor—are determined (like all prices) by supply and demand. They call this the market theory of wage determination. When workers sell their...

While the pure model of market determination of wages may have fully explained pay for work in the past, wages in the current economy are not shaped only by the market—the laws of supply and dema...

In addition to the federal government, unions have historically played a large part in shaping wages in America. In industries in which workers are well organized, wages are determined not just by...

In recent decades, union power has declined considerably. In 1945, union membership peaked at 35% of non-agricultural workers. Today, only 12% of all workers are union members, and if government...