Low-wage jobs  too big a part  of the recovery

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2:31 PM Monday, April 18, 2011

From the beginning of the current recovery from The Great Recession, the main problem has been jobs. Corporate profits have been excellent. Overall growth of the economy — the worth of it — has been good. Government revenues have started to pick up.

But for a long time, few new jobs were being added. Even now, the unemployment rate, while down substantially from its high point, is in a territory that historically would have been considered bad: 8.8 percent nationally and 8.9 percent in Ohio.

At some stages, some analysts have found it tempting to play with the notion that a lot of people have become semi-satisfied with being unemployed. The unemployment rate is actually a measure of the number of people who say they are seeking jobs. At times, it has moved slightly downward even when the total numbers of jobs hasn’t grown.

That’s an indication that people are either giving up or possibly deciding that they don’t want a bad job if, say, theirs is the second income in a family.

In some fields, employers have actually said that they can’t find qualified workers.

New figures, however, suggest that people are hardly being picky about the jobs they’ll take. Cox News Service Staff Writer Randy Tucker reported Friday, April 15, on the basis of government statistics, that the number of Ohioans earning $7.25 an hour (the federal minimum wage) or less has more than doubled since the beginning of the recession. From 77,000, it is most recently reported at 172,000.

News like that puts a damper on the news that Ohio has actually been adding more jobs recently than other states.

The gap between the federal and state unemployment rates was much bigger at the depths of the recession. The U.S. rate hit about 10.1 percent, the Ohio rate about 10.6 percent. The narrowing suggests an Ohio bounceback. It is certainly good news.

However, in 2010 almost half the new jobs in Ohio were in retail or food service or were temporary, areas with a reputation for low pay.

Perhaps there’s some good news in the very latest unemployment numbers, for March. While they don’t show any great jump in numbers of jobs generally (2,200 statewide), they show manufacturing jobs up by 7,100.

Truth is, though, other months during the recovery have also shown manufacturing looking relatively good.

At any rate, the numbers about jobs that pay the minimum wage or less confirm a trend that has become all too obvious, not just since the recession began, but over the longer term. For a wide swath of people in the middle class and lower, purchasing power is diminishing. And fewer people are landing stable jobs with good benefits.

Now inflation threatens to return. Overall, it’s still pretty tame. But then there are gasoline prices.

As the recovery proceeds, it’s important for government leaders to keep an eye on how it is playing out. People who lost jobs during the recession that were appropriate for their education levels are, after being unemployed for a long time, taking lesser jobs. This happens even as Ohio as a state is struggling to ensure that more people get college educations.

That is an appropriate thrust, of course, because, among other reasons, the educated are often the ones who produce jobs.

Meanwhile, though, a lot of people are going backward in life. That’s a central problem not only of the recovery period, but of our time.

Cox News Service

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