The big news isn't the slow return of jobs — It's the drop in pay

Jobs growing slowly, wages falling fast

The biggest losses during the Great Recession were jobs paying $19.05 to $31.40 an hour. By contrast, the biggest gains over the past year have been jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour.

Robert Reich
Sunday, March 13, 2011

Are we making progress on the jobs front? Just barely. And that's not even the big story, which I'll get to in a moment.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 192,000 new jobs in February (220,000 new jobs in the private sector and a decline in government employment), and a drop in the overall unemployment rate from 9 to 8.9 percent.

It looks as if we're heading in the right direction. But the progress is far too slow to make a real dent in unemployment. To get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent by 2014, we'd need more than 300,000 new jobs a month, every month, between now and then.

In some ways, we're just treading water. The number of unemployed Americans - 13.7 million - is about the same as it was in January. The number working part time who'd rather be working full time - 8.3 million - is also about the same.

In other ways, we're going backward. Millions of jobless Americans are no longer on the radar screen because they've stopped looking for work. The percent of the total workforce either in jobs or actively looking is at its lowest point in 25 years.

These job dropouts make the unemployment rate look far better than it really is. If the share of Americans who are either employed or seeking work was the same today as it was before the Great Recession, the current unemployment rate would be 11.5 percent instead of 8.9 percent.

But here's the big story, and it's especially worrying: Most of the jobs we've gained pay less than the jobs we've lost.

(More here.)