"Low-Paying Jobs Have Dominated Employment Growth"

From East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Society: NEW YORK – A new study finds that low-paying jobs have dominated employment growth in the first year of the recovery, while occupations offering bettery pay have been far slower to return. The report, by the National Employment Law Project, is the first to examine the recovery’s growth trends specifically by occupation, and it offers the latest sign that jobseekers are encountering a severe deficit of good jobs as they navigate the labor market. The NELP study analyzes employment trends for 366 detailed occupations, drawing on newly available data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), and ranks their median wages into three groups:  lower-wage ($7.51 to $13.52 per hour), mid-wage ($13.53 to $20.66 per hour) and higher-wage ($20.67 to $53.32 per hour). From the first quarter of 2010 through the first quarter of 2011, the most recent data available, lower-wage occupations grew by 3.2 percent, with retail salespersons, office clerks, cashiers, food preparation workers and stock clerks topping the list.  Mid-wage occupations, including paralegals, customer service representatives and machinists, grew by only 1.2 percent, while higher-wage occupations declined by 1.2 percent, which includes occupations like engineers, registered nurses and finance workers. Even as lower-wage jobs have generated the most growth, the wages they pay have fallen disproportionately – seeing a 2.3-percent decline since the start of the recession.  Workers in mid-wage occupations saw more modest declines (-0.9 percent), while workers in higher-wage occupations actually saw slight gains in real wages (+0.9 percent).  Overall, wages have fallen 0.6 percent since the start of the recession. “There has been a stark, disproportionate loss in mid-wage occupations during the recession, which puts a heavy burden on the recovery to replenish the stock of good mid-wage jobs,” said report author Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director at the National Employment Law Project.  Find NELP’s report on the web here: www.nelp.org/goodjobsdeficit.