*SMLR-Net, the source of selected news on labor and employment relations and human resource management.*

* * Date: Sept 10, 2012 Source: Center for Policy and Economic Reseach (CPER)

Link: http://bit.ly/QjqGoQ Headline/Title: Bad Jobs, Infographic Edition!

*Summary:* Our recent CEPR reporthttp://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/bad-jobs-2012-09.pdf“Bad Jobs on the Rise” found that between 1979 and 2010, the share of workers in a “bad job” increased from about 18 percent to about 24 percent. (In that report, we defined a bad job as one that pays less than $37,000 a year, lacks employer-provided health insurance, and lacks an employer-sponsored retirement plan. (For more details, see the report or this earlier posthttp://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/cepr-blog/bad-jobs-bad-jobs-whatcha-gonna-do .)

The report emphasizes that the increase in bad jobs was especially disconcerting because the U.S. workforce was older and much better educated in 2010 than it had been in 1979. In the figure below, prepared by our CEPR colleague, Milla Sanes, we ask: What would the bad-jobs rate have been in 2010 without this age and educational upgrading of the workforce? The middle line shows the actual path of the bad-jobs rate over the period. The top line traces out the path the economy would have followed had we kept the same age and educational* *characteristics of the 1979 workforce, combined with the same losses in the economy’s ability to create good jobs. Under these assumptions, about one in three jobs (33.9 percent) would have been a bad job in 2010. The distance between the top two lines represents how much age and educational upgrading of the workforce helped to lower the bad-jobs rate.

* **Author:* Janelle Jones and John Schmitt For the Full Article/Report, See: http://to.pbs.org/NZrNhp