Read it here first: New Jobs pay less

After kicking around the BLS website after Friday’s news release, I discovered Saturday that the BLS had found that “Fifty-seven percent of workers who were displaced from full-time wage and salary jobs and who were reemployed in such jobs had earnings that were lower than those on the lost job. About one-third experienced earnings losses of 20 percent or more.”

The New York Times picked up the same story today:

“The data is still inconclusive. But the weakness in job creation and the apparent weakness in high-paying jobs may be opposite sides of a coin. Companies still seem cautious, relying on temporary workers and anxious about rising health care costs associated with full-time workers. Many economists say that over the long term, the most vulnerable positions are those at the low end of the wage scale that require fewer skills and are easily replicated.

Even now, at a time when a disproportionate number of new jobs appear to be lower-paying ones, there has been growth in some high-income occupations like accounting, architecture and software.

Yet the earnings gap between the highest-paid employees and the rest of the work force is still widening, as it has over most of the last 30 years. The trend is most striking in factories, which accounted for the bulk of job losses in the last three years and tended to pay above-average wages.”

That was pretty quick; Usually, esoteric economic fare takes weeks (if not months) for the majors to catch up with them.

Source:
It’s Not Just the Jobs Lost, but the Pay in the New Ones
EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYTimes, August 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/09/business/09jobs.html

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  1. anon commented on Aug 9

    I see you are sending Alterman polling links. You dirty dog! If Doc keeps running your name, the bipartisan veneer is going to come off.

    fwiw, I originally found your site from Bilmon’s link. Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me!

    The trend is still down.

  2. dilbert dogbert commented on Aug 9

    Seems to me that this is what one would expect in a buyers market for employment. When you have been looking for work for a year, 6 mo, or whatever, you take what is offered.

  3. Yasser commented on Aug 9

    I suspect that this phenomenon partly explains the antipathy of blue-collar workers towards free trade.

  4. Barry Ritholtz commented on Aug 10

    You could draw that conclusion — but then you would only be getting half the picture.

    My research gets quoted ( pretty regularly) in National Review, Barrons, and the WSJ. What conclusion can we draw from that?

    Indeed, both Doc at Altercation and Larry Kudlow in National Review quoted something I wrote on the exact same day!

    If that’s not fair and balanced, I don’t know what is . . .

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