2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Ten Reasons Why Hillary lost - And they are probably not what you thought [View all]CajunBlazer
(5,648 posts)And its premise is itself misleading. What it said was that the percentages of low paying jobs, medium paying jobs, and high paying jobs have remained relatively the same. This is not surprising and indeed would be expected under any economic conditions.
Working for McDonald's is not like to ever move from being a low paying job to a medium paying job, and being an elementary school teacher is not likely to become a high paying job. The number of jobs in each of the three major categories cited in the article are likely to remain the same. Even the minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour, working at McDonald's would still be a low paying job.
What happens during a recession is there are less jobs in every category and virtually no one gets a raise because there are plenty of others who will take a job without a raise.
What happens at the top of an economic recovery is that the pay of most people will go up because when the country reaches full employment there aren't enough people to fill the jobs available. So employers have to compete for good employees.
However, just because wages are rising almost universally, doesn't mean that a guy working at McDonald's going to make a salary anywhere near that of a teacher or that a teacher will start making salary in the same third as a doctor.
In my humble opinion the article is simply a useless restatement of the obvious and contributes absolutely nothing to your argument..