Sen. Sanders:The U.S. now has more low-paying jobs than any other major country on earth. Morality?

[Igel]

6. Too many poorly defined terms.

"Major countries." If a country has more low-paying jobs, merely reclassify it as "not a major country," if possible.

"Low-paying jobs." If a country has too many jobs that don't have high wages, relativize the pay scale to the mean or median income. Then take an arbitrary percentage of that income to define "low-paying." Even if you can't deny China "major country" status, then jobs that barely permit survival aren't "low paying." Or declare agrarian workers to not have "jobs".

There's also the minor issue of # versus %. Let's say I'm in a country with 50 million workers, 35 million (or 70%) of which have low paying jobs. Compare that to the US, with 147 million workers employed (seasonally adjusted #s) in October 2014. OECD says 25% or so had "low paying jobs" (not the OECD's, take, but that's how it got spun in the OP), or about 36 million. US is worse off according to the numbers, but not the percentage.

That's just the OP.

In fact, the OECD report that this seems to be based on defines speaks not of "low paying" jobs but of "low pay workers," receiving 33% or less of the median wage as average income. If the US median wage is $52k, then anybody making less than $17k/year is a low-pay worker. Notice the bait-and-switch ploy used: My students making $11/hr are low-pay workers because they make $11/hr, which handily puts them over the OECD's cutoff. A full-time worker has to earn $8.51/hr, hardly a living wage, to stop being a low-pay worker. No, the students are low-pay workers because they work part time.

How you calculate median wage varies country by country, and the OECD report takes pains to point them out. (But they're not all in one place). Apparently the US has an above average median wage; however, that means we have a high dispersion rate, pretty much by definition. We also have greater work-place participation than the OECD average, esp. those that the OP probably considers to be our peer countries. Reduce participation by 4-5% and you'd probably reduce part-time work by a fairly large amount (or increase demand--barring any influx of cheap immigrant labor) and that would solve much of the "low pay" employed.