Welcome to Fluther.
Any response that you get on this question in terms of “a number” representing “the answer to your question” should be taken with a grain of salt. Maybe an entire block of salt.
“Percentage increase in salary” is going to cover a lot of ground. It’s a curve with a strong constraint on the left side (but not an absolute bound at “0%”, because some salaries are undoubtedly dropping. Not many, we can presume.) So it’s a curve that more or less starts at 0% and who knows where it ends on the right? 1000%? 10,000%? I don’t know. If an all-star ballplayer gets a new contract raising him from $5 million per year to $6 million per year, then that’s “only” a 20% raise. But a younger ballplayer might get a raise from $1 million to $5 million: a 400% raise.
Even with the information about some “company executive salaries” above, that’s by no means universal. Since most businesses in this country are “small business” and there are relatively few people earning executive salaries on par with some professional athletes. So most “company executives” are probably struggling somewhat, themselves. Okay, so maybe they don’t have to worry about bus fare every day, but still, everyone struggles in his or her own way. And if they can’t afford to send both boys to Philips Exeter or Choate this year, then that might represent their own struggle.
To get a better picture of this one measure of central tendency, average (mean) percentage change in salary is only one value to look at. You might also want to compare that to the median salary change and the entire range of salary changes.
Of course, it would be worthwhile to plot these values against the year-over-year change in inflation, which will better represent the actual “world purchasing power” of the US dollars.
Personally, I don’t think Dickens is going to make a comeback in this country for another few generations.