{"id":50775,"date":"2012-09-12T10:21:29","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T15:21:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2012-09-05T14:12:33","modified_gmt":"2012-09-05T19:12:33","slug":"recession-recovery-most-new-jobs-are-bad-jobs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/09\/12\/recession-recovery-most-new-jobs-are-bad-jobs\/","title":{"rendered":"Recession Recovery? Most New Jobs are Bad Jobs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Cross-posted at <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/2012\/09\/03\/low-wage-employment-recovery\/\" target=\"_blank\">Reports from the Economic Front<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The media has focused on the lack of jobs as a major election issue.\u00a0 But the concern needs to go beyond jobs to the quality of those jobs.<\/p>\n<p>As a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nelp.org\/index.php\/content\/content_about_us\/tracking_the_recovery_after_the_great_recession\">report<\/a>\u00a0by the National Employment Law Project makes clear, we are experiencing a low wage employment\u00a0recovery.\u00a0 This trend, the result of an ongoing restructuring of economic activity, has profound consequences for issues of poverty, inequality, and community stability.<\/p>\n<p>The authors of the report examined 366 occupations and divided them into three equally sized groups by wage.\u00a0 The lower-wage\u00a0group included occupations which paid median hourly wages ranging from $7.69 to $13.83.\u00a0 The mid-wage\u00a0group range was from $13.84 to $21.13.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The higher-wage\u00a0group range was from $21.14 to $54.55.<\/p>\n<p>The figure below\u00a0shows net employment changes in each of\u00a0these groups during the recession period\u00a0(2008Q1 to 2010Q1) and the current recovery (2010Q1 to 2012Q1).\u00a0\u00a0 Specifically:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Lower-wage occupations <\/em>were 21 percent of recession losses, but 58 percent of recovery growth.<\/li>\n<li><em>Mid-wage occupations <\/em>were 60 percent of recession losses, but only 22 percent of recovery growth.<\/li>\n<li><em>Higher-wage occupations <\/em>were 19 percent of recession job losses, and 20 percent of recovery growth.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/?attachment_id=1060\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1060\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1060 aligncenter\" title=\"NetChangeinOccupationalEmployment\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/files\/2012\/08\/NetChangeinOccupationalEmployment1.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"472\" height=\"333\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The next figure\u00a0shows the lower-wage occupations with the fastest growth and their median hourly wages.\u00a0 According to the report, three low-wage industries (food services, retail, and employment services) added 1.7 million jobs over the past two years, 43 percent of net employment growth.\u00a0 According to Bureau of Labor Statistics <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/2012\/02\/20\/the-employment-education-mismatch\/\">projections<\/a> these are precisely the occupations that can be expected to provide the greatest number of new jobs over the next 5-10 years.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/?attachment_id=1061\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1061\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1061 aligncenter\" title=\"lowwage\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/files\/2012\/08\/lowwage.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"475\" height=\"338\" \/><\/a>\u00a0As the final figure\u00a0shows, the decline in mid-wage occupations predates the recession.\u00a0 Since the first quarter of 2001, employment has grown by 8.7 percent in lower-wage occupations and by 6.6 percent in higher-wage occupations.\u00a0 By contrast, employment in mid-wage occupations has fallen by 7.3.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/?attachment_id=1062\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-1062\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1062 aligncenter\" title=\"OccupationalGrowthRates\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/files\/2012\/08\/OccupationalGrowthRates.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"474\" height=\"323\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nSignificantly, as the report also notes,\u00a0\u201cthe wages paid by these occupations has changed. Between the first quarters of 2001 and 2012, median real wages for lower-wage and mid-wage occupations declined (by 2.1 and 0.2 percent, respectively), but increased for higher-wage occupations (by 4.1 percent).\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A <em>New York Times<\/em> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/08\/31\/business\/majority-of-new-jobs-pay-low-wages-study-finds.html?_r=1&amp;hp\">article<\/a> commenting on this report included the following:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">This \u201cpolarization\u201d of skills and wages has been documented meticulously&#8230; A recent <a title=\"Professor Autor\u2019s study.\" href=\"http:\/\/papers.nber.org\/papers\/w18334?utm_campaign=ntw&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_source=ntw\">study<\/a> found that this polarization accelerated in the last three recessions, particularly the last one, as financial pressures forced companies to reorganize more quickly.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">\u201cThis is not just a nice, smooth process,\u201d said Henry E. Siu, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia&#8230; \u201cA lot of these jobs were suddenly wiped out during recession and are not coming back.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Steady as she goes is just not going to do it and changes in taxes and spending programs, regardless of how significant, cannot compensate for the increasingly negative trends generated by private sector decisions about the organization and\u00a0location of, as well as\u00a0compensation for\u00a0production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The media has focused on the lack of jobs as a major election issue.\u00a0 But the concern needs to go beyond jobs to the quality of those jobs.\u00a0 As a\u00a0report\u00a0by the National Employment Law Project makes clear, we are experiencing a low wage employment\u00a0recovery.\u00a0 This trend, the result of an ongoing restructuring of economic activity, [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1853,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,36,12498,253,76],"class_list":["post-50775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-economics","tag-economics-great-recession","tag-history","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1853"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50775"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50865,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50775\/revisions\/50865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}