‘Unbalanced Recovery’: Wages Falling, Low-Paid Jobs Rising Across US

While wages have declined across all sectors in the years following the financial crash of 2008, low-paid workers have been hit the hardest, the National Employment Law Project (NELP) reported this week. NELP analyzed five groups of median wages in its report, titled An Unbalanced Recovery: Real Wage and Job Growth Trends (pdf). Since 2009, while higher-income sectors saw a drop between 2.1 and 2.5 percent, workers in the three lowest-paid groups were hit much harder, with wage declines between 3.6 and 4.6 percent. Some of the hardest-hit professions within the three lowest-paid groups were maids, housekeepers, home health and personal care aides, and restaurant workers, whose wage decline ranged from 5.8 to 8.3 percent.

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