The November-December Review

In this volume, we have combined the November and December issues of the Review, in part to speed delivery and in part to spread out the materials available. For readers who track the Bureau's data through the Current Labor Statistics tables, please note that the November tables are presented in their

In the lead article, Jared Bernstein and Maury Gittleman take advantage of the uniquely rich National Compensation Survey (NCS) data to examine the reasons low-wage workers receive their low pay. The NCS data are particularly suited for this task because they include information about the characteristics of a specific job that affect pay-setting for that position: knowledge required, complexity, scope, guidance received, physical demands, and so on. Analysis of these "leveling factors" shows that low-wage work is, in fact, concentrated in jobs that have low skill content. However, these factors don't explain everything: an independent variable marking jobs as "low-skilled" has significant explanatory power after controlling for specific skill content. Whether that is a result of an additional, and perhaps arbitrary, penalty imposed on low skill jobs or whether low skill demands and the characteristics of low-wage workers interact in a way that actually results in lower productivity cannot be determined by the model.

Low-wage work is just one of the problems facing the working poor, according to the article by Abraham T. Mosisa. Of the 3-1/2 million full-time workers who lived in families with incomes below the poverty line in 2001, slightly more than two-thirds cited low earnings, either alone or in conjunction with unemployment or involuntary parttime work, as part of their labor market problems.

James Campbell has contributed a report on multiple jobholding in 2002 on a State-by-State basis. Multiple jobholding rates were lower than they had been a year earlier in 31 States, were unchanged in 6, and higher in 13 States and the District of Columbia.