The two main axes of inequality in the U.S. labor market—occupation and workplace—have increasingly consolidated. In 1999, the largest share of employment at high-paying workplaces was blue-collar production workers, but by 2017 it was managers and professionals. As such, workers benefiting from a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from membership in a high-paying occupation. Drawing on occupation-by-workplace data, we show that up to two-thirds of the rise in wage inequality since 1999 can be accounted for not by occupation or workplace inequality alone, but by this increased consolidation. Consolidation is not primarily due to outsourcing or to occupations shifting across a fixed set of workplaces. Instead, consolidation has resulted from new bases of workplace pay premiums. Workplace premiums associated with teams of professionals have increased, while premiums for previously high-paid blue-collar workers have been cut. Yet the largest source of consolidation is bifurcation in the social sector, whereby some previously low-paying but high-professional share workplaces, like hospitals and schools, have deskilled their jobs, while others have raised pay. Broadly, the results demonstrate an understudied way that organizations affect wage inequality: not by directly increasing variability in workplace or occupation premiums, but by consolidating these two sources of inequality.

US earnings inequality has not increased in the last decade. This marks the first sustained reversal of rising earnings inequality since 1980. We document this shift across eight data sources using worker surveys, employer-reported data, and administrative data. The reversal is due to a shrinking gap between low-wage and median-wage workers. In contrast, the gap between top and median workers has persisted. Rising pay for low-wage workers is not mainly due to the changing composition of workers or jobs, minimum wage increases, or workplace-specific sources of inequality. Instead, it is due to broadly rising pay in low-wage occupations, which has particularly benefited workers in tightening labor markets. Rebounding post–Great Recession labor demand at the bottom offset enduring drivers of inequality.

Different measures exist to capture agreement, consensus, concentration, dispersion, and polarization in ordinal data. We compare consensus scores across specific situations for a better understanding of how different measures work in practice: constructed cases, simulated data where we know the underlying distribution, and empirical data. Although researchers have solved the ‘problem’ of measuring agreement, consensus, and polarization several times, we highlight similarities and equivalence across some existing approaches, while others differ substantially. The choice of method can lead to substantively different conclusions, and we recommend that researchers use a combination of measures and use graphics to examine the distribution qualitatively.

US earnings inequality has not increased in the last decade. This marks the first sustained reversal of rising earnings inequality since 1980. We document this shift across eight data sources, using worker surveys, employer-reported data, and administrative data. The reversal is due to a shrinking gap between low-wage and median workers. In contrast, the gap between top and median workers has persisted. Rising pay for low-wage workers is not mainly due to the changing composition of workers or jobs; minimum wage increases; or workplace-specific sources of inequality. Instead, it is due to broadly rising pay in low-wage occupations, which has particularly benefited workers in tightening labor markets. Rebounding post-Great Recession labor demand at the bottom offset enduring drivers of inequality.