Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and better-educated workers generally receive higher pay and better benefits, we would have expected the share of "good jobs" in the economy to have increased in line with improvements in the quality of workforce. Instead, the share of "good jobs" in the U.S. economy has actually fallen. The estimates in this paper, which control for increases in age and education of the population, suggest that relative to 1979 the economy has lost about one-third (28 to 38 percent) of its capacity to generate good jobs. The data show only minor differences between 2007, before the Great Recession began, and 2010, the low point for the labor market. The deterioration in the economy's ability to generate good jobs reflects long-run changes in the U.S. economy, not short-run factors related to the recession or recent economic policy

Union Advantage for Black Workers

In this report, we review the most recent data available to examine the impact of unionization on the wages and benefits paid to black workers. These data show that even after controlling for factors such as age and education level, unionization has a significant positive impact on black workers' wages and benefits. The union advantage is particularly strong for black workers with lower levels of formal education

Bad Jobs on the Rise

The decline in the economy's ability to create good jobs is related to deterioration in the bargaining power of workers, especially those at the middle and the bottom of the pay scale. The restructuring of the U.S. labor market -- including the decline in the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage, the fall in unionization, privatization, deregulation, pro-corporate trade agreements, a dysfunctional immigration system, and macroeconomic policy that has with few exceptions kept unemployment well above the full employment level -- has substantially reduced the bargaining power of U.S. workers, effectively pulling the bottom out of the labor market and increasing the share of bad jobs in the economy

A College Degree is No Guarantee

The Great Recession has been hard on recent college graduates, but it has been even harder for black recent college graduates. This report examines the labor-market outcomes of black recent college graduates using the general approach developed by Federal Reserve Bank of New York researchers Jaison Abel, Richard Deitz, and Yaqin Su (2014), who recently studied the outcomes of all recent college graduates

Down and Out: Measuring Long-term Hardship in the Labor Market

The official concept of "long-term unemployment," while useful, is incomplete and, in some cases, even potentially misleading. As tracked by government statistics, the long-term unemployed are only a relatively small part of the population facing extended, sometimes permanent, spells without work

Long-term Hardship in the Labor Market

In this paper, we attempt to paint a demographic portrait of long-term hardship in the labor market. We display various measures of long-term hardship by race and gender, education, and age. In addition to the conventional long-term unemployment rate, we also show a broader measure that captures further dimensions of long-term hardship. This additional measure is the Bureau of Labor Statistic's "U-6" alternative unemployment rate, which adds "discouraged" workers, the "marginally attached," and workers who are "part-time for economic reasons" to the official unemployment rate

Has Education Paid Off for Black Workers?

Over the past three decades, the "human capital" of the employed black workforce has increased enormously. In 1979, only one-in-ten (10.4 percent) black workers had a four-year college degree or more. By 2011, more than one in four (26.2 percent) had a college education or more. Over the same period, the share of black workers with less than a high school degree fell from almost one-third (31.6 percent) to only about one in 20 (5.3 percent). The black workforce has also grown considerably older. In 1979, the median employed black worker was 33 years old; today, the median is 39. Economists expect that increases in education and work experience will increase workers' productivity and translate into higher compensation. But, the share of black workers in a "good job" -- one that pays at least $19 per hour (in inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars), has employer-provided health insurance, and an employer-sponsored retirement plan -- has actually declined. This paper looks at this trend and policies that would have a large, positive impact on the quality of jobs for black workers

Making Jobs Good

A series of earlier CEPR reports documented a substantial decline over the last three decades in the share of "good jobs" in the U.S. economy. This fall-off in job quality took place despite a large increase in the educational attainment and age of the workforce, as well as the productivity of the average U.S. worker.This report evaluates the likely impact of several policies that seek to address job quality, including universal health insurance, a universal retirement system (over and above Social Security), a large increase in college attainment, a large increase in unionization, and gender pay equity

Down and Out: Measuring Long-term Hardship in the Labor Market

The official concept of “long-term unemployment,” while useful, is incomplete and, in some cases, even potentially misleading. As tracked by government statistics, the long-term unemployed are only a relatively small part of the population facing extended, sometimes permanent, spells without work. This report proposes rethinking our understanding of long-term unemployment in two ways. First, we encourage shifting from a narrow focus on long-term unemployment toward a broader concept of “long-term hardship” in the labor market. Many workers or potential workers who do not fit the official definition of long-term unemployment – including “discouraged” and “marginally attached” workers and those involuntarily working part-time jobs – face long-term hardship in the labor market, but are not captured in the standard measure of long-term unemployment. Second, we suggest complementing the standard measure of long-term unemployment, which reports the share of the unemployed who have been out of work for 6 months or more, with an alternative measure, which reports the share of the total labor force that has been unemployed for 6 months or more. This alternative measure avoids some counter-intuitive properties of the standard statistic and is better for making comparisons across demographic groups.unemployment, long-term unemployment, discouraged workers, marginally attached workers, part time for economic reasons

Raising the Social Security Payroll Tax Cap: How Many Workers Would Pay More?

On January 1, the maximum amount of annual earnings subject to the Social Security tax -- a.k.a. the payroll tax cap -- increased to $113,700. Every year, this cap is adjusted to keep up with inflation. Many Americans are not aware that income above the cap is not taxed by Social Security. In other words, workers who make$113,700 or less per year pay a higher Social Security payroll tax rate than those who make more. To help alleviate Social Security's long-term budget shortfall, raising -- or even eliminating -- the cap has gotten some attention from policy makers. This paper finds that just 1 in 20 workers -- the wealthiest -- would be affected if the cap were eliminated entirely, and only 1 in 75 would be affected if the cap were applied to earnings over $250,000. In addition, the share of workers who would pay more varies greatly according to gender, race, state and age