Maybe with benefits, yes.
“Maybe with benefits, yes.”
You just put your finger on it. Whenever economists talk about “pay” they usually quote the total average compensation package. This is how you get teachers making 100K, but I digress.
And as another poster noted... there’s mandatory overtime. A lot of these jobs — not all, but a lot — are 50 to 60 hours per week.
These are the numbers that your journalist pulls up when they are writing articles about the economy. The reader needs to ‘discount’ some of those numbers.