US – Of the 6.6 million jobs added during the recovery, 2.9 million were good jobs report finds

After years of slow growth, jobs are back in large numbers. The national unemployment rate is now 5.3 percent, down from the peak of 10 percent in October 2009. The economy added 250,000 jobs per month in 2014, the best year in job growth since the beginning of the millennium. The job growth fell off a bit in 2015, but has continued its deliberate advance, adding on average more than 200,000 jobs per month.

The economic recovery still has a long way to go. After all, this has been the worst recession since the Great Depression, and an unusually weak recovery. Yet, the American job machine is producing jobs again, especially for college graduates. But are these good jobs? Many media accounts suggest the nation is flooded with baristas who were trained to create business plans and Uber drivers who can solve differential equations. Certainly such overqualified workers exist, as they would in any economy, but we find they are the exception, not the norm. The surge in hiring is not concentrated in dead-end McJobs. If anything, the surge is concentrated at the other end of the scale: in good, high-paying jobs that provide benefits.

The prevailing media notion of recovery dominated by low-wage job growth is greatly overstated. When the U.S. workforce is divided into three equal parts based on the median wage of workers’ occupations, and then change in employment in each of the three occupational tiers is tracked since the beginning of the recovery, the good jobs (2.9 million) make up 44 percent of all job gains in the recovery. The FTFYequivalent wage for these workers is $53,000 or more (Figure 1). By comparison, low-wage jobs pay $32,000 or less but comprise only 27 percent (1.8 million) of the jobs added in the recovery.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at  Good Jobs Are Back | CEW Georgetown.