The Occupational Structure and Low-Wage Work in the United States

• In Event: 256 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 14. Social Inequality at Work

Abstract

Nearly one-quarter of workers in the United States earn poverty-level wages, and this fraction has increased in recent years. An active literature demonstrates the salience of the occupational structure for earnings, and class inequality more broadly. However, there has been relatively little corresponding work on the relevance of standard occupational characteristics for low-wage work. This paper uses a data from the 1979--2013 waves of the Current Population Survey (CPS) and a series of regression models to address two questions. First, what is the explanatory power of standard worker and occupational characteristics for inequality in low-wage work across occupations? Second, how do the relationships between changes in occupational characteristics and low-wage work compare longitudinally? Results indicate that more than 90\% of the variation in low-wage work between occupations is explained by standard worker- and occupation-level variables in 2013. Longitudinally, the probability of low wages is higher with increases in occupation-level employment insecurity. Changes in the demographic composition of occupations had mixed effects, which varied over time. Overall, the paper's findings highlight the relevance of the occupational structure for low-wage work, consistent with research on the broader salience of occupations for inequality.

Author

• Ryan Matthew Finnigan, University of California-Davis