SLIDING DOWN THE LADDER:Trading Down: Laid-Off Americans Increasingly Taking Pay Cuts - And Kissing Their Old Lives Goodbye

Front Page Huff Post.... 3 page article wow

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/19/trading-down-long-term-unemployed_n_850220.html

The country we once knew is gone.

""When you have a large number of job seekers, then employers are free
to bid down and lower wages because there are plenty of workers to go
around," said Carl E. Van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers University
who studies the effects of long-term unemployment and trading down in
the workplace. "This is all worrisome. It impacts communities, families,
public expenditure."


"But a unique feature of this recession and recovery, as the NELP
report highlights, has been the disparity between the wage level of jobs
created versus jobs lost. ""The growth after the 2001 recession, as the
report notes, was both faster -- the first year of recovery created half
the number of jobs lost in that recession -- and more evenly
distributed among low- and high-wage industries."

Annette Bernhardt, one of the authors of the NELP report and the
group's policy co-director, stressed that it's too early in the recovery
to make broad pronouncements about long-term changes in the growth of
the kind of lower-wage jobs that keep Knudsen and others living paycheck
to paycheck. She said that growing number of workers will likely need a
stronger regulatory hand, however, to guard against minimum-wage
violations, the refusal of contractually-obligated overtime pay and
other employment offenses commonly referred to as "wage theft."

"For workers right now trying to navigate the labor market, their job
opportunities have deteriorated relative to before the recession,"
Bernhardt said. "Given the numbers of workers that are faced with having
to take low-wage jobs, I think there's clearly an argument over the
coming years to focus on strengthening the wage floor by increasing the
minimum wage and fighting the problem of wage theft."

"When it comes to wages, the basic story of recent decades is redolent of Scrooge," Princeton economist Alan Blinder wrote in a December editorial for the Wall Street Journal.
"Real average hourly earnings (excluding fringe benefits) now stand
roughly at 1974 levels. Yes, that's right, no real increase in over 35
years. That is an astounding, dismaying and profoundly ahistorical
development."

Not a bad article, left it a Facebook comment.