READ THE ARTICLE AND ANSWER QUESTION The United States is producing a lot of jobs, but how many are “good” jobs? That’s

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READ THE ARTICLE AND ANSWER QUESTION
The United States is producing a lot of jobs, but how many are
“good” jobs? That’s hard to know because of a lack of data and
because there’s no agreed-upon definition of what makes a job good
or bad.
A new project called the Job Quality Measurement Initiative aims
to fix those problems and fill a big hole in our understanding of
the labor market. I got an early look at the project this week and
so I’m sharing what I learned with you.
The U.S. Department of Labor began the initiative in cooperation
with several nonprofits, including the Families and Workers Fund,
the Omidyar Network, the Lumina Foundation and the Ford
Foundation.
“We’re constantly measuring the number of jobs in the U.S.
economy, but the quality of the jobs has gone largely unmeasured,”
Rachel Korberg, executive director and a co-founder of the Families
and Workers Fund, told me in an interview.
If quantity of jobs were all that mattered, workers would be in
heaven right now. After spiking in 2020 during the pandemic
recession, the U.S. unemployment rate has plunged, reaching 3.6
percent in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That’s tied with a couple of months right before the pandemic for
the lowest jobless rate since the 1960s. There were nearly 11.3
million job openings in the United States at the end of February,
more than triple the number a decade earlier, B.L.S. data show.
However, the strong demand for labor over the past several years
has not translated into meaningful pay gains. While average hourly
earnings for all employees on private, nonfarm payrolls rose
to $31.73 in March, up 5.6 percent over the past 12
months, that wasn’t even enough to keep up with consumer prices,
which shot up 8.5 percent over the same period. And that’s just in
the past year. “It is no longer news that most U.S. workers,
especially those without college degrees, saw wages stagnate over
the past four decades,” Erica Groshen of Cornell and Harry Holzer
of Georgetown wrote last year.
Many workers lack leverage to demand higher pay. They’re less
likely to belong to labor unions than in the past, especially in
the private sector. Some don’t understand their options, while
others are undocumented and thus at the mercy of their employers. I
spoke with Joel Salazar, 34, an undocumented 2018 immigrant from
Venezuela who until recently traveled the country cleaning up after
disasters such as hurricanes and fires. He described a life of
sleeping in cars in mall parking lots, coping with downed
electrical wires and toxic chemicals without adequate protection
and being cheated of wages by employers and harassed by the
police.
Salazar saw his job as good in one key respect, though: “People
thank us for rebuilding their communities,” he said in Spanish.
“There is a pride.” (He is now a field organizer for an
organization called Resilience Force that helps disaster workers
such as he was.)
That gets to a larger point. What’s perceived as a bad job by
one person might be a great one to another. Forester. Bartender.
Pet groomer. President of the United States (!). To get around the
differences in preferences, the measurement initiative is working
with the Aspen Institute to choose criteria that just about
everyone would agree are important. The criteria, which will be
announced in June, are likely to revolve around economic stability
and mobility, and what Korberg calls “equity, respect and
voice.”
People can disagree even over those basic criteria. How would
you rate a job that pays well but offers poor mobility or equity? A
LinkedIn member survey released this month found that a
third of workers would exchange a small cut in pay for more
enjoyable work, and a quarter would do so in exchange for “a
stronger chance to grow in the role,” among other hypothetical
options — but 46 percent would not give up pay for anything.
Labor economists talk about two kinds of employers. Some take
the high road, designing jobs that are varied and interesting,
require lots of training and are well paid. Others take the low
road, dumbing down jobs so that anyone can do them and consequently
paying lower wages. What low-road employers save in pay is offset
by higher costs for supervision and rapid turnover. “Companies
taking those two different approaches can coexist in the same
industry. So it is a choice,” Groshen of Cornell told me.
Not all of the “high road” companies are white-collar
operations. Maureen Conway, executive director of the Aspen
Institute’s economic opportunities program, favorably cites
QuikTrip Corp., a privately held company based in Tulsa, Okla.,
that has more than 24,000 employees in more than 900 locations,
where they sell food and gasoline. QuikTrip designs “stable jobs,
more interesting jobs,” Conway said. Employees are taught to
interact with customers and track inventory. The extra training
takes time. “There’s a significant on-boarding process,” she said.
“There’s job shadowing for a couple of weeks.”
Most people would consider the high-training, high-pay job to be
better than the low-training, low-pay job. But not all. Some people
just need quick money to pay the bills and may lack the
inclination, time or ability for a “high road” job. I got an
example of that when I spoke with David Zamir, founder and C.E.O.
of Nana Academy, a company that trains people in appliance repair
at no cost and then sends them out on jobs. Zamir said Nana
graduates who learn the most complicated repair jobs can make
$160,000 a year or more. But “15 percent want simple and easy,” he
said. “They want in and out.” And that’s fine, he said.
You might think it stands to reason that jobs would improve when
workers are in greater demand, but in at least one respect it’s
just the opposite, according to research by Brad Hershbein, a
senior economist and deputy director of research at the W.E. Upjohn
Institute for Employment Research. When companies are desperate to
fill openings, they will lower their hiring standards, which may
require them to simplify tasks, he said. That would be a low-road
approach. Conversely, when unemployment is high, they will hire
only the most highly skilled applicants, giving them the option to
make jobs more complex — a high-road strategy. (Whether they
actually properly pay people for the more complex work is harder to
answer.)
Hershbein told me that the average quality of new jobs has risen
over the past 15 or so years in a ratchet pattern: increasing in
periods of high unemployment and not going all the way back in
periods of low unemployment. He has built an index that finds more
hiring in high-wage occupations than in low-wage occupations.
That’s happening even in industries that have reputations for low
pay, he said: “In leisure and hospitality, it’s not just wait staff
and cooks. You have market analysis — where should I open a
restaurant? — and consultants on décor and food.”
The Job Quality Measurement Initiative plans to release its
findings in September. Korberg said she would love to see an index
of job quality included in the monthly jobs report. On the other
hand, the B.L.S. has a tight budget — Groshen, commissioner of the
agency from 2013 to 2017, said it hasn’t conducted a survey of
employer-provided training since 1995. She also notes that some
aspects of job quality, such as upward mobility, can be calculated
only in retrospect. (You can’t tell if people can move up until
they have actually done so, which takes years.)
Initiatives to measure job quality are long overdue. Think about
it: Jobs are as plentiful as they’ve ever been, but who’s feeling
wonderful about the condition of American workers?
QUESTION:
What Makes a Good Job Good?(An initiative to define what makes
jobs bad or good is long overdue.)
Based on an organizational behavior point of view, an what we
have talked about in the course, how would you define a "Good job"
(its not only money or economic factors)