Recent job growth mostly in low-wage occupations

Sociologist Annette Bernhardt recently published a short article on Alternet describing how the Faux Economic Recovery is Primarily Low-Paying Jobs.

“In this article she describes how “During the Great Recession, the jobs we lost were concentrated in mid-wage occupations like paralegals, health technicians, administrative assistants and bus drivers, making $15 to $20 an hour.  But so far in this weak recovery, employment growth has largely come from low-wage occupations like retail workers, office and stock clerks, restaurant staff and child care aids.”

Annette has been at the forefront of empirical research on low-wage work in America. She and her colleagues have made critical contributions to our understanding of low-wage work, including Low-Wage America, which she co-edited, and Divergent Paths: Economic Mobility in the New American Labor Market, which she co-wrote. In Divergent Paths, she and her colleagues compare a cohort entering the labour market in the mid-1960s with one entering in the early 1980s,. They find that low-wage careers have doubled from the earlier cohort to the more recent one, from 12.2 per cent of workers to 27.6 per cent.