Dive Brief:
- Despite a rebound in earnings, early career workers are experiencing negative wage growth thanks to inflationary pressures, according to research from Glassdoor Economic Research released Wednesday.
- Glassdoor predicted in November that new grads who could land a job would “see higher purchasing power” in 2026. However, “inflation rose again as American households face higher energy prices due to the U.S.-Iran war in a way we did not anticipate at the end of 2025,” Glassdoor said.
- Inflation “pushe[d] up the break-even rate for early-career wage growth,” and the 7.2 million salaries submitted on Glassdoor that were analyzed in the report didn’t show that kind of increase. Early career workers’ real earnings in 2026 fell 0.7% below 2020 levels, Glassdoor found.
Dive Insight:
Workers overall continued to experience lesser power and stability, the report showed.
Job offer decline rates continue to decrease, falling to 21.4% for interviews that started between January 1 and April 15, which represents a 5.1-percentage point drop from a year before.
At the same time, the “forever layoff” — a “pattern of a sluggish labor market, increased layoff anxiety, and the occasional mass layoff” — plagues the market, Glassdoor said.
While some industries have seen layoff levels fall below pre-pandemic levels, such as in construction, others, like information (covering media and technology), have surged, per the report.
“Layoffs are still top of mind for workers, and anxiety about layoffs and job security are still skyrocketing,” Glassdoor said. Mentions of job insecurity by current employees jumped 63% from the previous year, and mentions of layoffs climbed 29%.
The return-to-office push also continues; the percentage of workers who are fully remote fell to 11.1% in May compared to 12.5% in May 2025, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Among workers polled recently by Gallup who had been laid off, 25% said they previously were fully remote.