After two straight quarters of gains, the wages paid to tech workers at temporary jobs have stalled, according to Yoh Services, a technology staffing firm.
The hourly rate paid to tech workers was $30.99 in the second quarter ended June 30, virtually flat compared to $30.98 an hour in the first quarter.
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In a year-to-year comparison the hourly wages are down 1.41% from last June's $31.43, reported Yoh.
Whether the latest report is a bellwether of broader technology hiring trends remains to be seen. Tech wages had bottomed out to four-year low of $29.81 an hour last September, but had been increasing until this most recent report.
In the tech job categories tracked by TechServe Alliance, an industry group representing IT services firms, tech employment was down by 300 jobs in June, but even with this decline number of employed tech workers was up 3.39% from the year ago month.
The alliance compiles its data from the U.S. Labor Dept.'s monthly jobs report.
In June, the U.S. economy added 18,000 jobs overall. The Labor Dept. is due to release on Friday the jobs report for July.
Joel Capperella, senior vice president of client solutions at Yoh, characterized the wage picture as chaotic, and the recent flattening of wages may be a sign of slowing GDP growth and fallout from the uncertainty created by the debate in Congress over the debt limit.
Capperella isn't expecting wages to jump dramatically by any means, but "I do see demand (from employers) being consistent."
Yoh has been collecting wage data for about a decade from a technology labor pool that now includes 1,000 businesses and more than 5,000 technology workers. It conducts its survey 13 times a year.
Dice.com, a jobs board, said in June that a survey of 900 IT managers and recruiters found that 65% said plan on increasing the pace of tech hiring in the second half of the year.
Patrick Thibodeau covers SaaS and enterprise applications, outsourcing, government IT policies, data centers and IT workforce issues for Computerworld. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @DCgov , or subscribe to Patrick's RSS feed . His e-mail address is pthibodeau@computerworld.com .
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This story, "Temp tech wages stall after earlier gains" was originally published by Computerworld.