The AI shrinkflation of white-collar jobs: More work, same pay, fewer perks

Benefits are shrinking, flexible spending accounts are vanishing, and wellness programs are disappearing. But none of it shows up in wage data

The conventional way to measure whether workers are doing better or worse is to look at their wages. By that yardstick, white-collar workers appear to be holding steady: Salaries have been flat to slightly up, and the headline unemployment rate, while ticking higher, remains below historical alarm levels.

But wages are only one piece of what a job is worth. And as the AI era accelerates, and its effects on white-collar work proliferate, the rest of the package has been getting smaller. Here's what to know.

The bag of chips is getting lighter

Aaron Terrazas, former chief economist at Glassdoor, described the dynamic to Quartz as "kind of like shrinkflation," borrowing the consumer-pricing term for a product that shrinks while its price stays the same. In employment, the analogy works like this: The salary number on the pay stub doesn't change, but the benefits around it erode, the non-salary compensation thins out, and the job itself expands to absorb duties that once belonged to two or three people.

That framing suggests the standard metrics used to gauge worker compensation are missing something. Wage data, the figure economists and policy makers most commonly cite, captures only one dimension of a multi-dimensional bargain. If benefits shrink, perks vanish, and workloads grow, a........

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