WSJ: Low Pay Clouds Job Growth

From the Wall Street Journal online: 

The U.S. labor market's long, slow recovery slowed further in July—and many of the jobs that were created were in low-wage industries.

... hiring was also weaker in May and June than initially reported. Moreover, more than half the job gains were in the restaurant and retail sectors, both of which pay well under $20 an hour on average.

"These jobs count as jobs in the jobs reports, but there's very little attention paid to the kind of jobs these are," said Arne Kalleberg, a sociology professor at the University of North Carolina and the author of the book "Good Jobs, Bad Jobs." "They tend to be low-wage jobs, they tend to be in retail and personal-service-type sectors, many of them are part time."

...the proliferation of low-wage jobs is leading to anemic growth in incomes. Average hourly wages were up by less than 2% in July from a year earlier, continuing a pattern of weak wage growth in the recovery. A broader measure of income released by the Commerce Department on Friday showed that inflation-adjusted incomes actually fell slightly in June...

Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, said such trends are likely to continue as long as unemployment stays high and hiring remains weak.

"There's nothing putting upward pressure on wage growth," Ms. Shierholz said. "Your employer doesn't have to pay you big wage increases when they know you don't have outside options."
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Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324635904578643654030630378.html