When Emilia Stancati worked as a sprinkler fitter for a construction company, she made $80,000 per year. But in 2008, along with millions of fellow Americans, she lost her job in the economic crisis of the Great Recession. Today, as a waitress in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, she makes only $15,000 annually, well short of the median annual pay for that job of $21,640. Stancati’s irregular shifts change all the time, and in order to make ends meet, the 50-year-old does her best to combine server jobs for a full-time schedule. Still, she is unable to cover the roughly $20,000 in living expenses she needs to get though a year. “Oh God, I hate this,” she said stepping out of her car towards one of the restaurants where she works. “I’m tired of carrying trays and running and getting up at 4 o’clock in the morning ... always depending for my money on how other people feel about me.” “So when you ask what would be my dream, I don’t have one,” Stancati says. During the recession, 3.8 million mid-wage jobs and 1.4 million low-wage jobs were lost. In contrast, during the recovery, only 700,000 mid-wage jobs and 2 million low-wage jobs were gained. Across the countries, the job market has seen wage stagnation, requiring people to become satisfied with lower salaries.

According to the National Employment Law project, job growth has been uneven during the recovery. Neda Djavaherian



Real jobless rate: Measures of unemployment show disparity



Usual metric 'U3' doesn't include discouraged workers or part-time employees, which factor into 'U6' Source: Federal Reserve Economic Data.

Allen Sanderson, an economist at the University of Chicago, compared the standard measure of unemployment to a player’s batting average in baseball, saying that both indicators are “consistently imperfect” over time. “There are a lot of things that don’t ‘count’ in that denominator: walks, errors, home runs.” “But whatever rate you want to use, there are problems with the numerator and the denominator,” he added, referring to how the official unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of employed by the total number in the labor force. “Some people looking for work just can’t find it. Other people aren’t really looking very hard,” Sanderson said. “Now we’ve got a significant chunk of unemployed long-term … and that’s a problem. The longer you’re out of the labor force, your skills depreciate [and you’re] not particularly employable.”

‘Some people looking for work just can’t find it. Other people aren’t really looking very hard...The longer you’re out of the labor force, your skills depreciate [and you’re] not particularly employable.’ Allen Sanderson economist, University of Chicago