Thread: The strongest economy in the world

There are a few jobs being created.

Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds

Brian Blanco for The New York Times

The food industry has added 300,000 low-paying jobs in the recovery.
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Published: August 30, 2012


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.

Who Wears the Pants in This Economy? (September 2, 2012)

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.....

Entire: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/bu...3&ref=business

Some details in another article on the same topic of jobs:

The economic reality is that, thanks to smart machines and global trade, the well-paying, middle-class jobs that were the backbone of Western democracies are vanishing. Neither Mitt Romney’s smaller state nor Barack Obama’s larger one will bring them back. That is because the paradoxical driver of this middle-class squeeze is not some villainous force — it is, rather, the success of the world’s best companies, many of them American.

The record profit at Caterpillar, for example, is a tribute to the company’s skill at operating in a global marketplace and adopting cutting-edge technologies. But for some Caterpillar workers, that good news recently translated into a six-year wage freeze, which union employees accepted after a strike in Joliet, Illinois, failed to secure a better deal.

Entire: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/us....html?src=recg