Abstract
In December 1986, the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Congress made public its commissioned report, “The Great American Jobs Machine” (Bluestone and Harrison, 1986). It was to become one of the committee’s most controversial of the year. The “Jobs Machine” study concluded that during the 1980s the U.S. economy continued to churn out new jobs at about the same rapid pace as during the previous decade, but a majority of the jobs created after 1979 were of dubious quality as measured by the annual earnings they paid. The JEC report revealed that while more than 20 million additional jobs were generated in the United States between 1973 and 1984, nearly three out of five (58 percent) of the net new jobs created after 1979 paid $7,400 or less a year (in 1984 dollars). In contrast, fewer than one in five of the additional jobs generated between 1963 and 1979 had paid such low wages.1
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Bluestone, B. (1990). The Great U-Turn Revisited: Economic Restructuring, Jobs, and the Redistribution of Earnings. In: Kasarda, J.D. (eds) Jobs, Earnings, and Employment Growth Policies in the United States. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2201-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2201-3_2
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