Not only are more Americans employed, but their jobs are better
Sure, the US labor market added 280,000 jobs last month. And sure, more people are joining the labor force. But are these new jobs any good?
For a lot of the recovery, the quality of new jobs wasn't great. Low-wage employment was growing at a much faster rate than higher-paying employment. From 2008 to 2010, full-time employment sank and the number of people taking part-time work for economic reasons exploded. It seemed like the average American's job quality was deteriorating.
In the past year, however, these job-quality woes started to fade away says a new report from UBS.
One of the biggest fears of both the overall recovery and the implementation of the Affordable Care Act has been that employers will prefer to hire part-time to save costs. In the past year, however, 2.7 million of the 3.06 million total jobs created were full-time. Additionally, the number of persons forced to work part time for economic reasons dropped by 660,000.
UBS
High-wage jobs, those in industries that make more per hour than the national average, have increased by 1.4 million in the past 12 months, equaling the growth of low-wage jobs.
"This is a sign that at least the earlier deterioration of job quality has ceased," UBS economists said.
The percentage of high-wage jobs growth compared to low-wage has also been increasing since 2013. The one area of caution to note is that a similar trend occurred between 2010 and 2012 before a sudden drop in high quality growth.
UBS
Overall, it seems that good news continues to pile up in the labor market.
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