Economic Policy Institute (2026, March). “The Productivity–Pay Gap.” Washington: EPI.
The series compares the net productivity of the total US economy with the hourly compensation of production and nonsupervisory workers. EPI attributes the whole gap to rising inequality, including the gap between median and average pay and the falling labor share of income. Critics argue that the choice of price deflators and the exclusion of supervisory workers and benefits widen the measured gap (James Sherk at the Heritage Foundation; Stansbury and Summers, PIIE Working Paper 18-5, 2018). The wiki cites the series for the wage-productivity indicator, and in What GDP Leaves Out as evidence that part of the US household shortfall is a distribution effect within an accurate GDP.