Low-Wage Workers Can't Find Middle-Pay Jobs

[eridani]

http://www.manufacturing.net/news/2014/03/low-wage-workers-cant-find-middle-pay-jobs?et_cid=3819040&et_rid=54679148&location=top

For years, many Americans followed a simple career path: Land an entry-level job. Accept a modest wage. Gain skills. Leave eventually for a better-paying job.

The workers benefited, and so did lower-wage retailers such as Wal-Mart: When its staffers left for better-paying jobs, they could spend more at its stores. And the U.S. economy gained, too, because more consumer spending fueled growth.

Not so much anymore. Since the Great Recession began in 2007, that path has narrowed because many of the next-tier jobs no longer exist. That means more lower-wage workers have to stay put. The resulting bottleneck is helping widen a gap between the richest Americans and everyone else.

"Some people took those jobs because they were the only ones available and haven't been able to figure out how to move out of that," Bill Simon, CEO of Wal-Mart U.S., acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press.

If Wal-Mart employees "can go to another company and another job and make more money and develop, they'll be better," Simon explained. "It'll be better for the economy. It'll be better for us as a business, to be quite honest, because they'll continue to advance in their economic life."

Yet for now, the lower-wage jobs once seen as stepping stones are increasingly being held for longer periods by older, better-educated, more experienced workers.

[winter is coming]

1. Tell me again how the "recession" ended in 2009. n/t

[seveneyes]

2. But the unemployment and new hiring reports say all is well and getting better all the time

It's a verifiable rosy scenario out there in Economicville. Someone just needs to post that chart which shows the big dip and then the instant rise when the recovery happened.

[winter is coming]

3. Yeah, and that will make the long-term unemployed vanish!

Or was that "invisible"?

[sendero]

5. "Economists"....

... say it did! You know, the same idiots that didn't see the crash coming to begin with.

There is no recovery and there is not likely to ever be the economy some of us knew in the 70s and 80s and 90s ever again. This is the new normal because Americans would rather bend over and take it than do something about it.

[winter is coming]

7. Economists are still using the same definitions that made sense when

"good money economy" = "good labor economy". We need a better definition, because "people doing well" should be more important than "banks doing well".

[sendero]

10. fair enough....

.... my complaint is that for 5 years now I have been hearing about our "recovery" in the news media but there really is no recovery for the 99%.

Clearly, measures used to determine the health of an economy are no longer working, at all.

[HughBeaumont]

4. More like they're not financially capable of doing so.

Between exorbitant college costs and general scarcity of higher paying jobs (for every one, several workers are already competing for), hope is dwindling. Corporate America is sabotaging American progress via wage suppression.

[penultimate]

9. And if you're making shit wages that barely let you get by

you cannot save up money that allows you to pursue opportunities in other locations.

[xchrom]

6. du rec.

[JoePhilly]

8. Wages won't rise until we've had a lower unemployment rate for an extended period.

When millions lose their jobs as we saw with the recession of 2007-2008, wages drop.

The reason is because you now have more people competing for the same job. Assuming that the top 10% folks applying for the same job are of equal skill, the one willing to do the job for the least amount of money, gets the job.

Wages only increase as unemployment drops and companies can't find skilled people. To get people to come work for you, you have to pay more than what the top folks can get somewhere else.

Although UE has come down, it has not stayed down for a long enough period for wages to be impacted positively.

The next thing to look for is an increase in people making lateral moves, leaving from one job to take something new, even at the same level, but for more pay.

Presently, employers are not having to compete for good workers. And wages won't increase until they do have to compete.