WASHINGTON -- The Labor Department announced Friday that the economy added 126,000 jobs in March as the unemployment rate held steady at 5.5 percent, the latest in 61 consecutive months of positive jobs reports.
Some of the new jobs might not be very high-paying, however, as 38 percent of the gains occurred in retail, food service and temp agencies.
Much of the job growth since the Great Recession ended in 2009 has been concentrated in low-wage industries, a trend that seems likely to continue. The National Employment Law Project, a New York-based worker advocacy group, reported Thursday that five of the 10 occupations expected to see the most growth in the coming years pay less than $12 an hour.
Linda Tirado of Cedar City, Utah, worked in food service jobs for more than a decade before scoring a book contract in 2013 for Hand to Mouth: The Truth About Being Poor in America. She first received wide attention for a 2013 viral blog post she wrote that explained the logic of poor people's bad decisions.
Tirado, 32, said she worked her last food service shift on Black Friday that year and has made a living through writing about poverty since then. She has also launched a new project, BootStrapIndustries.com, designed to help poor people tell their stories.
HuffPost asked Tirado to share some insight into how workers might tell if they have not-so-great jobs, drawing on the most egregiously bad experiences she had during her many years of menial labor. She said a low-paying job is not necessarily a bad one, and having a good boss makes a huge difference. But, she said, she did not enjoy that Black Friday shift. Here are her thoughts:
- If you don't get holiday pay but you're forced to work holidays, your job sucks.
My husband had been in a car accident and I had checked my phone on my break and I got a series of missed calls and increasingly frantic texts. I went to my boss and said, "Hey, can I extend my break by 15 minutes, cause I really need to figure out what's going on." They looked at me and said, "If you go home, don't bother coming back."
I had a boss once and we were in the restaurant and we were doing a remodel. So the restaurant's shut down for a week and they said to just come in in work clothes and be ready to get horrifyingly dirty and greasy because we're moving all this equipment out and scrubbing it down in the parking lot while they're refurbing the inside. I roll in in a pair of hospital scrubs and a tank top and my boss told me I wasn't allowed to be near him because he wouldn't be able to stop staring at my cleavage and he'd never get anything done. And then he called me "tits" for the rest of day and everybody thought that was really funny.
Tirado also shared some examples of what might indicate you have a good job:
- You have a good job if you feel like you're allowed to be a human being while you're at work. You have a good job if your job isn't the thing that makes you wonder if you're going to be able to pay your rent. Which is to say, if you go to work and you're pretty sure you know how much money you make, that's a good job.