NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL: ..The economy added 214,000 jobs last month, in line with its performance over the past year. Consistent growth is certainly better than backsliding, but growth is still too slow: At the current pace, it will take until March 2018 for employment to return to its pre-recession level of health.
Even then, more jobs would not necessarily mean higher pay. Updated figures by the National Employment Law Project, a labor-advocacy group, show that about 40 percent of the private-sector jobs created in the last five years have paid hourly wages of $9.50 to $13, and 25 percent have paid between $13 and $20. Those findings are underscored by the new jobs report, which shows that nearly all of the private-sector job gains were in restaurants, retail stores, temporary work, health care and other low-to-moderate-paying fields.
Wages have barely kept up with inflation for several years running, and there are no economic or political forces to push them up. Working people can make more when employers bump up hours, which in October averaged a post-recession high of 34.6 hours a week. Workers also will see their paychecks go further as gas prices fall. But they are not getting ahead in any real sense… (more)
