View Research by Author - Josh Mitchell

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The Great Recession was characterized by dramatic declines in private-sector employment with a lagged decline in public-sector jobs as well. Even as the private sector has slowly recovered, public-sector job losses have continued to mount. This analysis finds that in both the private and public sectors, job losses have hit the young, the less educated, and women the hardest. Therefore, the public sector has reinforced rather than buffered private-sector trends.

For decades, the labor market has grown more polarized with employment and wages growing more slowly for middle-skill jobs than for other jobs. By most measures, polarization did not accelerate during the Great Recession. More polarization is evident, however, in the wages of re-employed workers.

Over the next five years, employment growth is projected to be slightly higher for jobs that require both the lowest and highest levels of education, although job growth is modest to slow across the board. The prospects for low-skill workers in the short-term are best in the leisure and hospitality sector and the professional and business services sector, with additional jobs appearing in construction as that sector continues to recover. A companion portrait of unemployed workers highlights that a disproportionate number of those seeking work are low-skilled.

Labor market deterioration during the Great Recession has been both substantial overall and unevenly distributed across regions and types of workers. In particular, low-skill workers have lost proportionately more jobs than other workers nationwide and done particularly poorly in a number of states. This fact sheet shows the loss of low-skill jobs by state over the recession and how it compares to overall job losses by state.

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