What Happened to Shared Growth? a Cross-Country Comparison of the US with Four Other Rich Countries, 1979-2014

Since the late 1970s, U.S. economic growth has failed to translate into more and better “decent” jobs. While the share of lousy jobs has risen sharply, their quality has declined, most dramatically for younger workers (18-34) with less than a college degree. This paper summarizes recent research, funded by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, that documents and attempts to explain patterns of job quality over recent decades by demographic group (gender, age and education) and economic sector for five rich countries: Canada, the UK, Australia and France. To facilitate cross-country comparisons and because many of the dimensions of what constitutes decent work are fairly highly correlated, I define decent jobs simply as those paying adequate (“living”) wages with adequate hours of work (not involuntary part-time work). Similarly, “lousy” jobs are defined as those failing to pay above the conventional low-wage threshold of 2/3 of the median for full-time workers – clearly not a living wage in the US – or as jobs in which workers are employed with inadequate hours. This paper will report results with data from national household (or labor force) surveys for the US and the four comparison countries for the post-1979 neoliberal period. The ultimate goal of the project is to document and help explain these cross-country job quality trajectories. The guiding hypothesis is that the conventional explanations - technology-driven skill mismatch and globalization - do a poor job of explaining these patterns. Rather, at the root of differences in the levels and trends in job quality across the rich world is relative worker bargaining power, which in turn is determined mainly by national political choices that are manifested in alternative institutional structures and policies.