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Why the pressure on wage growth? Some factors often posited include competition from foreign labor, immigration, a decline in unions' bargaining power and technological changes in the workplace.
"There are a lot of explanations out there, but there is clearly no single explanation," Irons said.
Irons does say a weak labor market plays a role in anemic wage increases. "The strongest income growth is when labor markets are really tight. The late 1990s are a great example. Employers were scrambling to find workers, and you saw big signing bonuses," Irons said.
Back then, 300,000 jobs created per month was seen as decent job growth. These days, many experts celebrate 150,000 new jobs, and job gains of less than 100,000 have been posted in recent months, Irons said.
And, while the unemployment rate is relatively low at 4.7%, it doesn't capture people who are not in the labor force. "The overall labor market is really creeping along much slower than we'd like," Irons said.
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Employers' expected 3.9% salary-budget increase for next year is an average. That means the news is much better for some than others.
A top performer "might get 8%, but the laggards might get zero or 1% or 2%," Jesuthasan said.
Average salary increases for executives will be slightly higher than those for lower-level workers next year, continuing a trend evidenced this year, when executives enjoyed increases topping 4% on average for the first time in six years, according to WorldatWork's survey of more than 2,500 North American companies and agencies.
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Averages are misleading
Also, workers at smaller companies enjoyed bigger increases. Companies with fewer than 500 workers reporting a higher salary budget increase this year -- 4.1% -- versus a 3.7% increase at firms with more than 20,000 workers, according to WorldatWork's survey.The Economic Policy Institute has found that higher-income people are enjoying bigger raises in recent years, Irons said. "The average increase is somewhat misleading because you're averaging high-income people who have done very well recently with middle- and low-income people who have done very poorly," he said.
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"It can never hurt to ask and to try to get a little more clarity, particularly at the beginning of the year when you're having other performance-goal conversations, to say, 'Am I eligible for a bonus? What would I need to earn one? Give me an idea of how much I can expect,'" he said.
"That's going to make some supervisors and managers uncomfortable, but employees should feel like they can ask that question to understand the overall employment deal."
This article was reported and written by Andrea Coombes for MarketWatch.
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