Jobs Without the Deal That Came With Them

The job market is the one number that still looks calm. Ask whether people can find work, and the answer reads about as reassuring as it has in years. The American Distress Index — the broad measure of household financial distress — reads 43.8 out of 100, and its labor side sits near the low end of its own record. By that measure, the economy is doing its job.

Ask what the work is worth, and the story turns.

The American Worker Index shows broad pressure on the American worker. It scores four things. What the job pays. Whether the jobs are there. How much bargaining power the worker holds. How the economy’s gains get divided. Each rides against its own history, back to the postwar years. On that scale the worker’s position sits in the worst tenth of the whole record.

Look inside the number and the split gets sharper. The one part holding up is the part about whether the jobs are there. The pressure on pay reads high against its own past. Bargaining power reads near the weakest of the postwar era, as union membership and labor’s share of income drain lower and the index catches the bottom of that drain. The division of gains reads high too.

So the jobs are there. The deal that used to come attached to them is thinner.

This is why one headline number keeps misleading. A low unemployment rate answers a single question. Can people find work. It was never built to answer the harder one. Is the work worth having.

The American Distress Index and the American Worker Index look at the same workers and disagree, because they measure different halves of the same life. One tracks whether households are underwater this quarter — the personal savings rate, the buffer behind every household budget, has thinned to 2.7%, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reports. The other tracks whether the arrangement between American work and American reward still holds. The first looks manageable. The second does not.