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Read it here first: New Jobs pay less

Monday, August 09, 2004 | 09:41 AM

After kicking around the BLS website after Friday's news release, I discovered Saturday that the BLS had found that "Fifty-seven percent of workers who were displaced from full-time wage and salary jobs and who were reemployed in such jobs had earnings that were lower than those on the lost job. About one-third experienced earnings losses of 20 percent or more."

The New York Times picked up the same story today:

"The data is still inconclusive. But the weakness in job creation and the apparent weakness in high-paying jobs may be opposite sides of a coin. Companies still seem cautious, relying on temporary workers and anxious about rising health care costs associated with full-time workers. Many economists say that over the long term, the most vulnerable positions are those at the low end of the wage scale that require fewer skills and are easily replicated.

Even now, at a time when a disproportionate number of new jobs appear to be lower-paying ones, there has been growth in some high-income occupations like accounting, architecture and software.

Yet the earnings gap between the highest-paid employees and the rest of the work force is still widening, as it has over most of the last 30 years. The trend is most striking in factories, which accounted for the bulk of job losses in the last three years and tended to pay above-average wages."

That was pretty quick; Usually, esoteric economic fare takes weeks (if not months) for the majors to catch up with them.

Source:
It's Not Just the Jobs Lost, but the Pay in the New Ones
EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYTimes, August 9, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/09/business/09jobs.html