As fixed salaries became increasingly meaningless in the late 1980s, high annual turnover, as much as 100 percent for urban industrial workers, was also typical of the Nicaraguan labor force. By 1988 real wages in Nicaragua were less than one-tenth of those in 1980, reflecting the impoverishment of the middle class as well as increasing numbers of the poor. Nonwage incentives instituted by the Sandinista government in the early 1980s for public-sector workers were abandoned during the period of extreme economic adjustment of the late 1980s. By inauguration day 1990, it was not uncommon for skilled office workers to earn the equivalent of US$10 per month, augmented in some cases by dollar-denominated bonuses for workers in the private sector.

Data as of December 1993