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CBS MarketWatch.com, October 18, 2004
New research on government wage data show that job categories with
lots of new openings pay about $1.90 less an hour than job categories
with lots of layoffs, according to Arindrajit Dube of Berkeley's Institute
of Industrial Relations.
"We find that growing jobs have paid about 10 percent to 12 percent
lower than shrinking jobs" over the past year and over the past
three and a half years, Dube said.
The largest group of growing jobs paid about $9 an hour, and were
"typically composed of service occupations in health services
and hospitality industries," the economist added.
The largest group of shrinking jobs paid between $12 and $15 an hour,
and were "typically represented by production workers in electronics
and machinery manufacturing, as well as administrative workers in
industries such as telecommunications or professional and technical
services."
The debate over the quality of jobs has been a minor but contentious
issue in the presidential campaign.
Republicans have countered Democratic charges about 821,000 lost jobs
during President Bush's term in the White House by saying that 1.8
million jobs have been added in the past 13 months. But Democrats
say those jobs aren't as good as the ones that were lost earlier in
Bush's term.
Based on an earlier and simpler analysis of the government's data
by the Economic Policy Institute, Democratic presidential candidate
John Kerry has said new jobs pay about $9,000 less a year than the
ones being lost.
FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan campaign watchdog group run by the Annenberg
Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, concluded
that Kerry was wrong, based on its own analysis showing that jobs
paying more than the median wage were growing faster than jobs paying
less than the median wage
But according to Dube's analysis, Kerry was partly right (the yearly
difference in growing and shrinking jobs would be about $3,800 for
a full-time job), while FactCheck.org's conclusion was not justified.
Dube's research is the most thorough examination of the wage and jobs
issue this year. The economist divided the employment universe into
440 "jobs" composed of 10 occupations within 52 different
industries.
Jared Bernstein, an economist for the Economic Policy Institute, said
that Dube's research backs up his own findings. Bernstein added the
deteriorating quality of jobs has both a structural and a cyclical
component.
Earlier examinations of the job quality issue had looked at much larger
categories of employment. In its study, USA Today looked at 25 industries,
while FactCheck.org looked at 154 different jobs categories.
Dube also examined wage growth within different strata of society,
rather than just looking at averages.
Jobs that pay in the bottom 10 percent of jobs saw average real wages
fall 1.4 percent since the recession ended, while jobs paying in the
top 10 percent of all jobs saw wages grow 0.1 percent, Dube found.
The bottom 50 percent of all jobs have had no increase in real wages,
on average, since the recession ended.
The number of jobs paying in the bottom third of all jobs grew by
1 percent since the recession began, while the number in the top third
grew by 0.6 percent. The number of jobs in the middle third was unchanged.
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