Laid-off US workers get lower-paying jobs

One in five Americans laid off from a long-term job in the last three years has not found a new one, and most who did are paid less than they were before, government data showed on Friday.
In a report that adds fuel to the debate over the quality of new jobs, the Department of Labour said only 65 percent of the 5.3 million workers who were laid off from January 2001 to December 2003 were re-employed by January 2004.
Of those who lost full-time wage and salary jobs and found new ones, 57 percent earned less than they had in the positions that they lost.
"About one-third experienced earnings losses of 20 percent or more," the department's Bureau of Labour Statistics said in the report.
Recent employment growth has buoyed the economic record of President George W. Bush, but Democratic presidential contender John Kerry has argued that the new jobs now appearing are inferior.
There are also wide divisions in the economics community over the issue because analysts disagree about which data best measure job quality.
The Labour Department report focused on "long-tenured" employees - the 5.3 million displaced workers who had held their jobs for at least three years.
Another 6.1 million Americans were laid off from jobs they had held for less than three years.
Twenty percent of the long-term workers were still unemployed in January, while 15 percent had left the labour force, according to the survey, which was conducted as part of a monthly poll of households about employment.
The report may stir up the controversy over the shift of jobs to low-wage countries, since it said 43 percent of workers cited plant or company closings or moves as the reason they were out of work. The report did not indicate whether the work had moved overseas or elsewhere in the United States.
"Nearly one-third of long-tenured displaced workers lost jobs in manufacturing," the report said, a stark measure of how much pain the factory sector suffered in the 2001 recession and the subsequent slow recovery.
The re-employment rate for laid-off manufacturing workers was 60 percent, five percentage points below the overall success rate.