More Jobs, Of A Sort


President Obama's comments at a gathering of 152 Democratic donors at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston were unexceptional. They were mostly boilerplate, highlighting the series of successes he has enjoyed in 2+ years as President.

Graciously complimenting former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi- without whose leadership those achievements would have been far fewer- Obama remarked

Not only were we able to get this economy going again, that in the last 15 months we’ve seen the economy add jobs…

We didn’t just rescue the economy we put it on the strongest footing for the future.

To his credit, the President didn't, as far as we know from this article, patronize us with yet another reference to "winning the future" while the GOP, emboldened by Obama's eagerness to compromise away his constituency, is winning in Congress. But according to analysis (transcript, in PDF, here) by the National Employment Law Project of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, enthusiasm for the economic recovery now in its infancy should be tempered. NELP observed

In the private sector, there is a striking imbalance between where the recession’s job losses occurred, and where the growth of the past 12 months was concentrated:

 Lower-wage industries constituted 23 percent of job loss, but fully 49 percent of recent growth

 Mid-wage industries constituted 36 percent of job loss, and 37 percent of recent growth

 Higher-wage industries constituted 40 percent of job loss, but only 14 percent of recent growth


With such a recovery, it doesn't appear we're doing much to reverse this trend:

Share|