[Vision2020] Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

<http://www.nytimes.com/adx/bin/adx_click.html?type=goto&opzn&page=www.nytimes.com/printer-friendly&pos=Position1&sn2=336c557e/4f3dd5d2&sn1=3f0d0918/c874980e&camp=FSL2012_ArticleTools_120x60_1787508c_nyt5&ad=Sessions_120x60_Aug20_NoText&goto=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efoxsearchlight%2Ecom%2Fthesessions>

------------------------------
August 30, 2012
Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds By CATHERINE
RAMPELL<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/catherine_rampell/index.html>

While a majority of jobs lost during the downturn were in the middle range
of wages, a majority of those added during the recovery have been low
paying, according to a new report from the National Employment Law Project.

The disappearance of midwage, midskill jobs is part of a longer-term trend
that some refer to as a hollowing out of the work force, though it has
probably been accelerated by government layoffs.

“The overarching message here is we don’t just have a jobs deficit; we have
a ‘good jobs’ deficit,” said Annette Bernhardt, the report’s author and a
policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project, a liberal
research and advocacy group.

The report looked at 366 occupations tracked by the Labor Department and
clumped them into three equal groups by wage, with each representing a
third of American employment in 2008. The middle third — occupations in
fields like construction, manufacturing and information, with median hourly
wages of $13.84 to $21.13 — accounted for 60 percent of job losses from the
beginning of 2008 to early 2010.

The job market has turned around since then, but those fields have
represented only 22 percent of total job growth. Higher-wage occupations —
those with a median wage of $21.14 to $54.55 — represented 19 percent of
job losses when employment was falling, and 20 percent of job gains when
employment began growing again.

Lower-wage occupations, with median hourly wages of $7.69 to $13.83,
accounted for 21 percent of job losses during the retraction. Since
employment started expanding, they have accounted for 58 percent of all job
growth.

The occupations with the fastest growth were retail sales (at a median wage
of $10.97 an hour) and food preparation workers ($9.04 an hour). Each
category has grown by more than 300,000 workers since June 2009.

Some of these new, lower-paying jobs are being taken by people just
entering the labor force, like recent high school and college graduates.
Many, though, are being filled by older workers who lost more lucrative
jobs in the recession and were forced to take something to scrape by.

“I think I’ve been very resilient and resistant and optimistic, up until
very recently,” said Ellen Pinney, 56, who was dismissed from a
$75,000-a-year job in which she managed procurement and supply for an
electronics company in March 2008.

Since then, she has cobbled together a series of temporary jobs in retail
and home health care and worked as a part-time receptionist for a beauty
salon. She is now working as an unpaid intern for a construction company,
putting together bids and business plans for green energy projects, and has
moved in with her 86-year-old father in Forked River, N.J.

“I really can’t bear it anymore,” she said, noting that her applications to
places like PetSmart and Target had gone unanswered. “From every standpoint
— my independence, my sense of purposefulness, my self-esteem, my life
planning — this is just not what I was planning.”

As Ms. Pinney’s experience shows, low-wage jobs have not been growing
especially quickly in this recovery; they account for such a big share of
job growth mostly because midwage job growth has been so slow.

Over the last few decades, the number of midwage, midskill jobs has
stagnated or declined as employers chose to automate routine tasks or to
move them offshore.

Job growth has been concentrated in positions that tend to fall into two
categories: manual work that must be done in person, like styling hair or
serving food, which usually pays relatively little; and more creative,
design-oriented work like engineering or surgery, which often pays quite
well.

Since 2001, employment has grown 8.7 percent in lower-wage occupations and
6.6 percent in high-wage ones. Over that period, midwage occupation
employment has fallen by 7.3 percent.

This “polarization” of skills and wages has been documented meticulously by
David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. A recent
study<http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18334?utm_campaign=ntw&utm_medium=email&utm_source=ntw>found
that this polarization accelerated in the last three recessions,
particularly the last one, as financial pressures forced companies to
reorganize more quickly.

“This is not just a nice, smooth process,” said Henry E. Siu, an economics
professor at the University of British Columbia, who helped write the
recent study about polarization and the business cycle. “A lot of these
jobs were suddenly wiped out during recession and are not coming back.”

On top of private sector revamps, state and local governments have been
shedding workers in recent years. Those jobs lost in the public sector have
been primarily in mid and higher-wage positions, according to Ms.
Bernhardt’s analysis.

“Whenever you look at data like these, there is this tendency to get
overwhelmed, that there are these inevitable, big macro forces causing this
polarization and we can’t do anything about them. In fact, we can,” Ms.
Bernhardt said. She called for more funds for states to stem losses in the
public sector and federal infrastructure projects to employ idled
construction workers. Both proposals have faced resistance from Republicans
in Congress.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20120831/47a66cc4/attachment.html>