Since 2000, the U.S. economy has shed 2.9 million jobs in (disproportionately male) production occupations, and 2.1 million in (disproportionately female) administrative and office-support roles. As the Post notes, such clerical jobs have been for non-college-educated women what manufacturing employment once was for non-college-educated men — a route to lifelong economic security. But as administrative assistant roles have been off-shored, automated, or — at the C-suite level — refashioned into elite positions staffed by lawyers and MBAs, that path to prosperity has been foreclosed to millions of working-class women. For middle-aged workers who had built careers in the field, this has meant sudden and harrowing downward mobility. According to the Urban Institute, more than half of all workers over 50 in the U.S. eventually lose their jobs involuntarily, and 90 percent of those workers get consigned to lower-paying work for the rest of their careers. Meanwhile, for the typical millennial non-college-educated worker, our ascendant “barbell economy” (which concentrates job growth at the top and bottom of the income ladder) doesn’t even provide ephemeral opportunities for middle-class employment. Critically, this is not because our society has no use for blue and pink-collar labor: Of the ten occupations expected to add the most jobs to the U.S. economy over the next decade, six are “low-skill” roles that pay less than $27,000 a year. This trend would be alarming enough in a world where America didn’t have an extortion racket for a health-care system, runaway inflation in its higher education sector, and housing markets beset by artificial scarcity. In the world we actually live in, the collapse of middle-income job opportunities has coincided with a meteoric rise in the costs of middle-class life.
...only 40 percent of Americans currently have “good” jobs. But a more telling (and less ambiguous) finding from its survey may be this: While 59 percent of U.S. workers say their wages have increased over the past five years, no more than 37 percent say any other key marker of job quality has improved over that period. In fact, roughly as many workers say their job’s non-cash benefits have gotten worse in recent years (21 percent) as say they’ve gotten better (23 percent). Meanwhile, majorities report no gains in their job’s sense of purpose, enjoyability, or the stability and predictability of its wages — all factors that respondents rated as being more important to job quality than overall pay.
