Dive Brief:
- The very different treatment accorded employees at the very top versus those in the bottom or middle ranks has become a fact of life at corporate offices, law and accounting firms, and other white-collar bastions across the country, according to an article at the New York Times.
- For the first time since the economic recovery began six years ago, white-collar professionals with specialized skills in fields like technology, finance, engineering and software find themselves in the catbird seat.
- But despite the steady addition of more than 200,000 jobs a month and a decline in the official jobless rate to a postrecession low of 5.3 percent, most American workers, including many college graduates, still face lukewarm wage growth at best and very limited bargaining power with bosses, the Times reports.
Dive Insight:
“If you want wage growth, you’re going to need a specific set of skills,” Matt Ferguson, chief executive of CareerBuilder, a recruitment software firm, told the Times. “The B.A. gets you in the door — there’s not much unemployment for people with a college degree — but it doesn’t allow you the wage growth you’d expect.”
The Times reports that a new study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that pay near the top of the scale in fields like art, entertainment and media was six times what it was near the bottom in 2014, compared with four times in 2007. The best-paid health care professionals now earn nearly four times what workers in the lowest tier make, compared with less than three times in 2007.
Lawrence Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard, called the phenomenon "polarization." He told the Times it was likely to add to the growing debate over income inequality in the United States, as college graduates find themselves taking jobs that pay less than they expected to earn. The situation is an interesting one for employers, who need to try and maintain talent levels across the entire workforce, but have to manage top performers at the same time.
