PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Rachel E. Dwyer
AU  - Erik Olin Wright
TI  - Low-Wage Job Growth, Polarization, and the Limits and Opportunities of the Service Economy
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.4.02
DP  - 2019 Sep 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 56--76
VI  - 5
IP  - 4
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/4/56.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/4/56.full
AB  - We analyze U.S. job growth from the 1980s to the 2010s. We define jobs as occupations within sectors to capture position in the production system as well as skill hierarchies. Low-wage jobs outgrew middle-wage jobs over much of this period, particularly for women and nonwhite workers. Service work drove most low-wage job growth, but even a small resurgence in manufacturing job growth in the 2010s was concentrated in low-wage jobs. Given the constraints of economic restructuring on the growth of decent jobs, we consider alternative logics for the creation of jobs in twenty-first-century economies. The prospects for job growth in the future, we argue, requires a robust defense of these alternative logics that can and do thrive alongside and within a capitalist market economy.