How Many Well-paid Jobs are Created?

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The May jobs report was disappointing at best. But the media (believe it or not) underplayed the bad news. For the question (for most middle-class peoples whose wealth is tied up in their homes) isn’t just how many jobs were created but whether those jobs pay enough to enable the folks who took them to buy a house. (Theirs for example.) For if the answer is no, then everyone’s wealth will decline simply because their house values will continue to plummet.


And the answer was no. A close reading of the report shows that many of the jobs were created in the service sector (and a McDonald’s employee is unlikely to be able to afford even the cheapest of homes). Further, most job gains were in non-unionized sectors (service and health care for the elderly). Again, this is troubling because, data shows that unionized employees generally have better benefits than their non-unionized counterparts. And people who don’t have to worry as much about their medical expenses have more disposable income. Income that can be used to buy a house.

This is also true historically. Most baby boomers were born from 1945 to 1960. Those, most economists agree, were good times for the American economy. It was also (and probably not coincidentally) a time when thirty percent of US workers were unionized. Today, it’s 11.9 percent and dropping. The bad times (if you define bad as an economy of continuous bubbles) happened in the 1920s, 1990s, and 2000—times when Wall Street was allowed to rule supreme and everyone was (and is) engaged in graft and speculation.

And the current government policies are not (in my opinion) helping. I agree that we needed to stabilize the markets and the auto industry bailout was probably the right thing to do. But we’re still bailing out banks and too big to fail corporations. Banks that don’t lend and corporations that hire cheap and definitely non-unionized labor. While Americans get to work for McDonald’s. If they’re lucky. In short, today I think government policies are fueling the kind of graft and speculation that got us into this mess to begin with.

If we’re going to throw money at someone maybe we should throw it at the middle class. While we still have one.

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