What’s Wrong With Low-Wage Jobs?

Yahoo Finance! had an article yesterday, "Low-wage jobs dominated hiring so far in job market recovery." They write:

There are two problems with the jobs recovery to date. Employers haven't added enough jobs. And those they have added aren't particularly good ones.

The former has gotten a lot of attention. But the low-wage jobs that have been added are also a cause for concern.

"Growth has been concentrated in mid-wage and lower-wage industries. By contrast, higher-wage industries showed weak growth and even net losses," said Annette Bernhardt, policy co-director for the National Employment Law Project. She said that growth has been far more unbalanced than during previous job recoveries.

Bernhardt's analysis of the first seven months of 2010 found that 76% of jobs created were in low- to mid-wage industries — those earning between $8.92 to $15 an hour, well below the national average hourly wage of $22.60. …

While this certainly isn't good news for job seekers who are professionals or highly skilled, why is it "a problem" to be having a rebound in low-wage jobs … the very jobs that so many of the poor and the unskilled are capable of landing?

Too many think of jobs as an array of income boxes where we place undifferentiated people. Thus, if we have more high-wage boxes, we can take some of the people in the low-wage boxes and deposit them in new high-wage boxes. Our problem is we don't create enough high-wage boxes.

People are not undifferentiated. You can create all the Certified Public Accountant boxes you want, but you aren't going to be able to take the high school-educated, nineteen-year-old sales clerk from her box and place her in the new one. Whether due to life stage, innate abilities, or other factors, job seekers will always be at all income levels. Why would we not celebrate a recovery in low-wage jobs? It is particularly interesting to me that it is frequently the same people who lament the outsourcing of low-wage jobs to other countries who also bemoan the creation of low-wage jobs during this recession.