What is the story of wages and growth?

Lifted from comments:

Run 75411 reacts to Daniel Alpert at Economonitor. :

It appears much of the job growth has been in low wage opportunity which forces people to do with less and detracts from demand led economic growth. The economic bump in taking a lower wage paying job is just not that great; average Unemployment Wages ($12.86/hr) as opposed to a Retail Opportunity at $15.80/hr. “less taxes say about $80—or the paltry sum of $4,160 per year of additional consumption.”Daniel Alpert

Interesting comment on falling Participation Rate being tied to baby boomers retirement:

“The Labor Force Participation Rate has also declined and is, more or less, continuing to decline—but its downward trend began well before the Great Recession. There is therefore a correlation between the falling LFPR and certain ongoing demographic changes in the CNIP.

Chiefly, such demographic changes arise from an aging U.S. population with growing longevity—typified by the ongoing aging-out of the enormous baby boom cohort from the labor force. But as real as those changes may be, the fact remains that the LFPR declined by all of 1 percent—to 66 percent from around 67 percent between 2000 and the beginning of the Great Recession. Since 2009, however, the LFPR has fallen nearly an additional 3 percent. This acceleration of the earlier trend is unlikely to merely be a demographic phenomenon.”Daniel Alpert

And what if the PPACA is behind much of the low wage and temp job growth?

Some have surmised that this year’s increase in part-time workers is related to employer concerns about being forced to provide health care benefits for full time workers under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). That might be a more plausible argument if newly created jobs were more evenly spread among low-wage and high-wage sectors. Anecdotal Obamacare-scare stories abound, but they seem pretty specious at best. After all, when 70 percent of the jobs created in Q2 2013 were in low-wage sectors in which casual and limited-hours hiring is not atypical (restaurants, temporary services and retail sales, for example), what else could be expected? There is no empirical evidence that hiring practices relate to concerns over benefits, and a heck of a lot of evidence that the people being hired for new jobs are earning less than workers already employed and that the jobs that a significant proportion of jobs being created are not full time because of the sectors they are in. If the Obamacare hiring meme were accurate, the tendency game the law would be to game the system by hiring people to work just under the 30 hour “full time” cut off under the act. But that does not appear to be the case either (see the next section). It’s the nature of the jobs, not the fears of the employer.” Daniel Alpert

I can not find myself disagreeing with much in Daniel’s article and I am glad Dan took the time to put the portal and the intro up on Angry Bear. This is a great review of Employment in the US, where the jobs are, what is happening with wages, BLS stats, etc. It is worth the read.

Some Charts:

High versus Low Wage Jobs:
1

Wage Growth and Lack Thereof:
2

Where is the Job Growth Happening?
3