Look, don’t get me wrong. The jobs report we’ve been eagerly awaiting this week was mostly good news: The economy added 162,000 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1%. 

However… not to be a Debbie Downer (shout out to a fellow Rachel from Lexington, MA), but today we’re diving into one of the report’s not-so-bright spots: wages. 

We’ll also check in on the people left out of the job report’s unemployment count, the states using their rural health funding to invest in health tech startups, and the 12-day business empires at the Minnesota State Fair.

Plus, the highest gas prices for Labor Day weekend, ever! Every day I'm more grateful that I don't own a car. — Rachel Kahn, temp newsletter editor

As he worked on this story at the office Friday morning, Mitchell Hartman kept getting interrupted by workers from a local HVAC firm installing new cables and ductwork in the ceiling above his desk.

So, he figured he might as well ask them: How’s the job going, compensation-wise?

“I mean, trending in the last couple of years, I’ve been getting consistent raises, but it doesn’t seem to really affect how much money that I’m able to spend,” said Kyle Wallis, a journeyman controls technician. “It’s like, I make more and more every year, but everything else is more and more expensive.”

Average hourly earnings — the broadest measure of compensation for working in this economy — were up just 3.1% year-over-year last month. That’s the slowest pace in more than five years. And there has been a pretty sharp slowdown in just the past six months.

Wages were growing 3.7% year-over-year back in February. And that’s the same period — since the Iran war started — when prices spiked higher for everything from gas to groceries.

“The American worker is working harder, productivity is up, wage growth is tepid, prices are continuing to rise,” said Kyle Moore, chief economist at The Century Foundation.

Wages are tepid for a few reasons, starting with the “low-hire, low-fire” job market, which has made workers hesitant to quit, said Bill Adams, chief U.S. economist at Fifth Third Commercial bank.

“And one of the big drivers of workers getting higher wages is when they switch jobs to a higher-paying one,” Adams said.

So, what would generate more wage growth?

“A job market with more competition among employers for workers,” he said.

But right now, it’s employers who have all the leverage.

Unemployment remained steady this month, at 4.1%. But there are tens of thousands – if not hundreds of thousands – of people who stopped working last month who don’t show up in the data: Syrians and Haitians who have lost work authorization due to the expiration of their Temporary Protected Status at the end of July. Nerette says around 35,000 of her union members relied on TPS for work authorization, and the loss is already being felt.

For 12 days every August and September, the Perfect Pickle sells beer-battered pickle chips to some of the nearly 2 million people attending the Minnesota State Fair – and by the time the gates close for the last time, the Perfect Pickle will have made its money for the entire year.

“A business day for us is like a business month for somebody else," said Greg Klindt, one of the stand’s owners. “If we have a problem where we can't process credit cards for an hour, that's like being down for a week.”

Klindt places pickle orders four months before the fair – a distributor couldn’t absorb an order of that size on short notice; the pickles literally have to be grown for it. “They actually plant their pickle fields based on what I order in advance,” Klindt said.