Declining Job Quality in the United States: Explanations and Evidence

Table 2.

Employment Shares for Wage Segments and Contours, 1979–2017 (percentages)*

Source: Authors' compilation.

Note: The poverty-wage threshold is the conventional low-wage cutoff: two-thirds of the median wage for full-time workers. The decent-wage threshold is defined as two-thirds of the mean wage for full-time prime-age workers. Lower-tier decent-wage jobs are those that pay up to 50 percent above the decent job threshold. Employment shares report the share of employed workers (eighteen to sixty-four) with wages within each contour or segment wage range. The data are from the merged outgoing rotation groups (MORGs) from the Current Population Surveys (CPS) for 1979 to 2017, accessed from the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).