The great American labor paradox: Plentiful jobs, most of them bad
1 min read
Photo caption: More and more people are stuck in low-wage jobs.
The numbers tell one story. Unemployment in the US is the lowest it’s been in 50 years. More Americans have jobs than ever before. Wage growth keeps climbing.
People tell a different story. Long job hunts. Trouble finding work with decent pay. A lack of predictable hours.
These accounts are hard to square with the record-long economic expansion and robust labor market described in headline statistics. Put another way, when you compare the lived reality with the data and it’s clear something big is getting lost in translation. But a team of researchers thinks they may have uncovered the Rosetta Stone of the US labor market.
They recently unveiled the US Private Sector Job Quality Index (or JQI for short), a new monthly indicator that aims to track the quality of jobs instead of just the quantity.
The JQI measures the ratio of what the researchers call “high-quality” versus “low-quality” jobs, based on whether the work offers more or less than the average income. […]
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