Here’s what we know about job quality, and it isn’t all bad
A commenter on a previous post asks whether the jobs being created these days are quality ones, adding that “for an increasing number of average folks, it takes two or three of these ‘new jobs’ to equal what we used to get in just one.”
The quality-jobs question is difficult to answer, because the Labor Department’s payroll survey, the primary source of job-growth numbers, gives us only average wages for fairly broad categories of workers. It doesn’t tell us whether the new hires are coming in above the average or below it.
The issue has been studied a lot, though. Here’s an excerpt from a column I wrote in July 2004, when the quality of jobs was being raised as a political issue:
Another monthly Labor Department report, the household survey, provides far more detail. Here, the government’s statisticians break down the work force both by industry and by occupation.
Two recent analyses, by Business Week magazine and by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, sliced that data into 154 different job categories, such as managers who work in the construction industry or salespeople who work in the financial industry.
They looked at the numbers in slightly different ways, but came to essentially the same conclusion. Business Week found that 65 percent of new jobs in the past year have been in categories that pay above the median wage. The Annenberg Center found that virtually all the new jobs were in higher-paying categories, with no growth in low-wage jobs.
The shift from manufacturing to services has been going on for a long time. But what people miss is that the service sector has highly skilled jobs, too.
“Doctors, teachers and nurses are growing faster than Wal-Mart clerks,” says Brooks Jackson, director of Annenberg’s Political Fact Check project and author of its jobs study.
I don’t know of more recent research along these lines, but if I find any, I’ll share it here.
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
Appreciate your attempt to answer the question about quality jobs, which I define as jobs with decent healthcare and retirement benefits. The 2004 studies only comment on pay, using the median figure. Median, of course, only means that half of the jobs pay above half of all possible wage rates. Average pay would be more useful…and, of course, some research into the trends regarding healthcare and retirement benefits would be even more relevant to my question. There is considerable evidence that fewer employers are offering heathcare benefits since at least the year 2000 and more companies than ever have switched away from defined benefit plans, or away from meaningful retirement security altogether. My main point is: the constant pointing to job growth, without any meaningful statistics about job quality, is rather Pollyanna-like. And on another point, it is a sad commentary on the Business Section when it can print a rather lame, rightwing hit piece book review of Paul Krugman latest book, as it did recently, but fail to do a fair/balanced/and accurate review of Naomi Klein’s bestseller about Disaster Capitalism. (There was a fairly decent review in the Arts and Entertainment Section last Sunday, and while Ms. Klein’s book is well-written and somewhat entertaining, it certainly deserved coverage in the Business Section. But there is probably a space issue: since the rightwing corporate think tank, the Show-Me Institute, tends to get a lot of ink in the Business Section.) Wake up, America!