“When we think about what the economy has lost since the Great Recession, we tend to consider it in terms of simple addition and subtraction. We said goodbye to more than eight million jobs in the downturn; we’ve added around four million back. It’s easy and dismal math,” writes Jordan Weissman for the Atlantic.
“But there’s another painful dimension to this recovery that’s gotten far less attention than the lingering jobs deficit. It’s the fact that most of the jobs we lost offered decent pay, while the ones we’re adding are mostly low-level, service sector positions. Middle class jobs have been replaced by McJobs.
“The National Employment Law Project highlights that switch in a new report from which I’ve borrowed the graph below. Mid-wage jobs, such as construction trades and secretaries, accounted for 60 percent of our employment drop during the recession but made up just 22 percent of the recovery through the first quarter of 2012, according to the most recent Current Population Survey data. Low-wage occupations, such as retail and food service workers, made up 21 percent of the losses and 58 percent of growth.*
