IN JUNE, ACCORDING TO THE U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, payroll employment increased by 288,000, and the unemployment rate decreased to 6.1 percent, the lowest during Obama’s presidency. (When he took office during the bursting of the real estate bubble, it was 7.6 percent and rising fast.)

The June report was encouraging, for a number of interrelated reasons.

For one, the growth appears to be sustained — June was the fifth consecutive month that employment growth has increased by more than 200,000, the first time that has happened this century.

Secondly, I have a pet theory that as the economy nears full employment and there is a growing possibility of a labor shortage, businesses tend to staff up in anticipation. Anyone who was a manager in the second half of the 1990s remembers the chronic labor shortages that characterized that period — and many of those managers have now advanced to a point in their careers where they have a lot of sway over hiring decisions. I expect this will be an increasing factor going forward, and this anticipatory hiring will surprise us with how quickly it soaks up a lot of the remaining slack in the labor market.

Moreover, the paychecks of all those newly hired workers will increase demand for the goods and services the economy produces. There are an awful lot of people who have spent the Great Recession driving cars that are held together with glue, string and hope, and who have been waiting for steady employment so they can replace those cars with something that has a warranty and for which prayer is not a large factor in the maintenance program.

There are also a lot of families where the kids have been sleeping in the living room of tiny apartments because the price of a bedroom has been out of reach for their parents. As the parents get hired, the kids stand a better chance of getting new clothes and having their own rooms — rooms that will need furniture, decor and so on.

Another factor is the level of debt by the American consumer. Americans have spent the last six years getting themselves out of debt — partly through bankruptcy and foreclosure, and partly by paying off credit cards and refinancing mortgages. According to the Federal Reserve, the household debt service ratio (roughly the proportion of income spent by consumers on mortgage payments, credit card payments and so on) is at a record low. This frees up income to be spent on goods and services, which, again, bodes well for the economy.

So there is much reason for hope that the economy may actually, finally, fully recover from the Great Recession some time in the next year or two.

That said, I still have concerns going forward.

First, keep in mind that roughly 70 percent of the U.S. economy is based on consumer spending, and the wages of the nation’s workers still lag — in June they increased by a mere 6 cents. I’ve mentioned before in this space that economic growth based on rising incomes is the most sustainable kind of growth, because the only alternative is to increase spending through debt, which leads — always — to misery.

Speaking of wage growth, I’d like to address a question I hear a lot when that subject comes up, especially for folks who were alive in the 1970s: “Don’t wage increases lead to inflation?”

The answer is, within certain limits, wage increases add demand to the economy without adding inflationary pressure. That “speed limit” is the rate of increase in worker productivity.

Let’s say there is a factory that employs 100 workers who produce 100 widgets per day. Let’s say those 100 workers put their heads together and figure out a way to get more widgets finished in the allotted time, and thus up their production to 110 widgets per day. Their productivity has thus increased by 10 percent, which means the owner of the factory can increase their wages by 10 percent and not have to raise his prices, since he has 10 percent more widgets to sell. If his workers take some of that gain in income to purchase widgets for themselves, the owner benefits further from those extra sales.

The preceding paragraph is a good description of the way the U.S. economy operated for roughly 30 golden years after World War II. Increases in productivity and wages moved in a synchronized manner. Beginning in the early 1980s, however, wage increases were suddenly decoupled from productivity increases, and have moved either sideways or, at best, feebly upward ever since.

So what happened?

Going back to our imaginary widget factory, what happened is that, rather than increasing his worker’s pay from their increased production, the owner instead essentially pocketed most of the increased income that resulted from the increased efficiency.

To put it more technically, the profit share of national income has risen to record levels.

As I said, increases in employment will lead to increased spending by newly hired workers — for now. But unless workers can get a rising share of economic gains, the current expansion will stall when the last surplus workers are absorbed.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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