A national study measuring job quality ranked Rhode Island as one of the five best-performing states.
A new gauge of job quality shows the long-term trend has been toward lower-quality jobs in the United States. Quality is defined in terms of employment shares and wages by industry or occupation. The national and state-by-state job quality study was produced by the Center for Business Research at Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business.
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In 2003, the highest job quality in the country was along the Atlantic Coast from Massachusetts to Virginia, with very strong job quality in the District of Columbia and Massachusetts, The school said in a release.
“Nationally, the rate of decline in job quality has been relatively modest,” said Tom R. Rex, associate director of the center. “Had no erosion in job quality occurred between 1969 and 2003, the average wage in 2003 would have been 5 percent higher than the actual figure.”
The manufacturing sector has been a major cause of the national decline in job quality over the last 35 years, the study found. “Many manufacturing industries pay above-average wages, but their workforces have declined as a share of total employment,” Rex said. “In contrast, some low-paying industries, particularly in retail trade and services, have experienced strong employment growth.”
Between 2000 and 2003 — a period marked by an economic recession in 2001 and a slow recovery that extended into 2003 — job quality nationally decreased at a rapid rate. “The sizable decline in job quality in recent years fits the historical pattern: most of the losses in job quality have occurred during economic recessions and in the recovery phase following recessions,” Rex explained. “Little pattern can be seen in the change in job quality over this period except that states with the weakest industrial mixes generally had the strongest gains in industrial job quality,” Rex said.
“By industry, a loss of jobs in the above-average-paying manufacturing sector was the largest cause of the decrease in job quality between 2000 and 2003,” Rex observed. “By occupation, a considerable number of jobs in the high-paying management occupational group were lost.”
Job quality was weakest in most of the mid-section of the country, stretching from the northern Rocky Mountains through the Great Plains and the South. However, the states with the lowest job quality were Nevada and Hawaii, both with a high percentage of low-paying tourism jobs.
The report Job Quality Nationally and in All States is available online at wpcarey.asu.edu/seid/Reports.cfm
