No Work, No Pay. The New Economy is the Old Economy

The NY times has a great piece about the employment situation in NY since the storm.

Yesterday, or maybe Thursday I had a brief discussion about the jobs report and how "fishy" they are. I pointed out that the previous report had dropped unemployment by 3 points but the latest one had reported more jobs but had no effect or an increase in unemployment.

I had pointed out that people are taking jobs that don't pay well, are part time and are generally not the type you want to have when you are trying to improve the lot of the so called "middle class". This NYT piece underscores what I've been saying:

Low-wage workers, more likely to be paid hourly and work at the whim of their employers, have fared worse in the recovery than those at the top of the income scale — in New York City the bottom 20 percent lost $463 in annual income from 2010 to 2011, in contrast to a gain of almost $2,000 for the top quintile. And there are an increasing number of part-time and hourly workers, the type that safety net programs like unemployment are not designed to serve. Since 2009, when the recovery began, 86 percent of the jobs added nationally have been hourly. Over all, about 60 percent of the nation’s jobs are hourly. [My emphasis]