White House Says Most New Jobs Pay Well
The White House said Tuesday that 68% of recently created jobs are in categories that pay in the top half of the wage scale, an upbeat report that nonetheless underscored the election-year pitfalls facing the Clinton administration on jobs and the economy.
The analysis, released by the White House Council of Economic Advisors, found that most of the jobs are in professional and managerial fields rather than service or part-time occupations. More than half were in categories that typically pay more than $625 a week. The report also noted median family income rose in 1994 for the first time in five years.
Yet such findings, which ordinarily would delight political leaders, also create awkwardness in a time of widespread voter anxiety about wages and layoffs.
For the White House, the good and bad news emerging from the workplace is prompting a balancing act between the desire to take credit for economic gains under President Clinton’s stewardship and the impulse to promote his economic programs.
Even as he reeled off the upbeat findings, White House chief economist Joseph E. Stiglitz felt compelled to toss in a pitch for the administration’s pro-worker agenda, which includes raising the minimum wage and increasing insurance protections for victims of corporate downsizing.
Walking the fine line is “quite a problem for them” at the White House, said Robert Reischauer, former head of the Congressional Budget Office and a scholar at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank in Washington.
Clinton, he said, must draw favorable contrasts with his Republican predecessor, George Bush, on jobs, while saying to the American people that, in a time of economic uncertainty, “I feel your pain.”
The 11-page analysis released Tuesday reflected an administration bid to seek answers to some of the questions about job creation and destruction that grip the public despite five years of national economic expansion.
Much of the news seemed encouraging: The government analysts found that between February 1994 and February 1996, 68% of new jobs were in occupational categories that pay above the median of $480 a week and that 52% were likely to exceed $625 a week.
Such jobs are in marketing, advertising, electronic engineering, accounting, auditing and certain health fields, such as laboratory technicians. Further, researchers concluded that the vast majority of new jobs were full time, despite assertions that the work force increasingly is composed of a second class of part-time and temporary employees.
“The answer is very unambiguous,” Stiglitz contended. “They are good jobs.”
Preliminary data also suggest a reversal of the decline in family incomes. The median level of $38,782 in 1994 reflected a 2.3% rise from 1993.
Many analysts, however, continue to bemoan the long trend of wage stagnation that has affected much of the work force. Given that problem, critics wonder whether the spotlight on new, high-wage jobs gives an accurate picture of the realities affecting most employees.
Also, it is possible that the findings that 68% of new jobs are in higher-wage categories may give an exaggerated impression. That is because, in theory, some of those jobs may pay less than average, even though they were created within occupational categories that tend to pay above average.
“I’m not sure this is going to strike a particularly resonant chord with the public,” said Ruy A. Teixeira, a political analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. “It just doesn’t sound right to people.”
White House economists also failed to determine whether the likelihood of being laid off has increased, because critical statistics beyond 1992 were not yet available. A comparison of layoff patterns in 1981-82 and 1991-92 did find that older workers and white-collar workers were somewhat more vulnerable to layoffs in the early 1990s than previously, although blue-collar workers remained at greater risk.
Some academic research suggests that the chances of a typical worker getting laid off have risen somewhat in the last few years, but not sharply.
Clinton often points out economic gains while reminding his audience of workers’ anxieties.
Republicans have attempted to deride the president’s economic performance with the label “Clinton crunch,” meant to remind voters that many workers have suffered stagnant or falling wages and that overall job creation in the 1990s has lagged the pace of earlier expansions.
