THE DISEMPLOYED

Your Job Probably Sucks

So take a breath: you aren’t being singled out

Today I read a startling fact about how many good jobs exist.

The metric for a “good job” is surprisingly low.

It needs to pay over $37,000 per year in the US and come with health benefits and a retirement plan.

The scale for what $37,000 per year means has to be adjusted by region because this huge country is highly stratified.

Here in Arkansas, that salary is not bad — even if you live in our only Big City, Little Rock.

Anywhere in California, that salary is a joke. In every sizable city in the Golden State, it’s poverty level.

Using the premise that enough money, plus benefits and retirement, equals a good job, The Center for Economic Policy Research concluded that the number of US workers with good jobs is declining.

It’s down to about 25% (in 2010) from a recorded high of 27.4% in 1979.

As a nation, we are losing our capacity to generate good jobs due to several factors.

So if you feel like your job isn’t cutting it, consider you are not alone by a long shot.

We have an aging populace, costly higher education, a spreading gig economy, and a tilting axis where larger chunks of money roll straight up into the hands of the millionaire and billionaire classes.

Consider, too, that 25% may be wildly optimistic.

That Intangible “It” Factor Called Respect

Aside from a living wage, which we’ll assume ranges from $37,000 a year in flyover country to $100,000 in places most of us wish we could live but can’t afford — there is the issue of what the job entails.

Is a high-paying job in the oil fields a good job?

Most would argue yes, because the pay is so high you can do it seasonally, or temporarily, then retire and live the good life.

Making enough money and having full-time work that includes health insurance coverage is fundamental because if you make $37,000 a year but have no health benefits, you are paying thousands of dollars each year for private health insurance on The Marketplace, where it’s cheapest. (For example, I pay over $10,000 per year).

Not having health insurance coverage significantly reduces take-home pay.

Most workers making $37,000 without benefits earn closer to $27,000 a year. (People under 30 can buy catastrophic coverage, which is cheaper).

A living wage is essential, but with job insecurity, an abusive boss, a dead-end situation, or a toxic workplace, no amount of money helps.

So 25% isn’t a true percentage. We all know people — or are people — who have unsustainable schedules, deranged bosses, and no hope for promotion.

How many workers actually have bad jobs? We can’t know for certain — but with 1 in 4 as a starting point, we can speculate.

Crap Schedules and Turd Bosses

The worst element in a bad job is arguably a terrible schedule because it disrupts the rest of your life.

Graveyard shifts, on-call positions, split shifts, and rotating shifts that change each week can potentially make a job unsustainable.

Underemployed people often work rotating or unpredictable schedules but anyone who is underemployed already has, by definition, a bad job.

Gig schedules mean you can usually pick your own hours.

It’s not unreasonable to assume that most jobs without benefits and/or paying less than $37,000 per year typically mean underemployment or an unpredictable schedule.

Is it worth counting people like EMTs, police, and firefighters? Most of them would probably say on the whole their jobs are good, but tough because they are rewarding. They earn enough, and they have benefits, but their schedules are the worst.

Still, I think most of them would agree they have a good job.

The other common feature of a bad job is a tyrannical boss. These abusive bosses can pop up even if your salary is fine and you get health coverage, so it’s safe to assume that (conservatively) 5% of “good jobs” include terrible bosses.

That’s probably an underestimate, but it’s reasonable and that means the true percentage of bad jobs is not more than 20%.

A terrible boss will ruin a perfectly good job.

At Least 4 in 5 Workers Have a Bad Job

If you take into account crappy management, this means the actual percentage of workers who have a “good job” is 20% or less.

This means only 1 in 5 American workers is blessed with a good job.

It’s not a bad idea to consider whole broken systems as places where bad jobs lurk. Two sectors come to mind: healthcare and education.

Frontline healthcare workers (often nurses) and teachers are working in increasingly horrible conditions.

Healthcare workers during Covid were attacked and teachers during Covid were overwhelmed. Public school educators are losing workers every year and fewer young people are choosing teaching as a profession. They know it’s often a bad job, despite the pay and benefits.

It’s safe to say that another 5% of workers — who otherwise make enough money and have benefits — are trapped in systematically hellish institutions.

This means only 15% of workers have good jobs, at a minimum.

For the Sake of Sanity

I’m doing all this math for my sanity because I’ve had about 90 jobs in my life and most of them haven’t been good.

The best job was working for Social Security Disability, where I made slightly over $37,000 per year, and got both benefits and a retirement plan.

We never had meetings. The metrics were clear. There were some bad bosses but you rarely had to worry about them because they had no interest in firing you.

The best things about the job were reading about people’s lives and feeling grateful I didn’t have some horrible disease (or was on the other side of the disability process) and sometimes helping people.

I worked as a high school teacher. It was awful and I watched my comrades die on the battlefield of public education.

I worked all sorts of menial jobs and they were all terrible because the pay was low, the conditions were uncertain, they were sometimes unsafe, and you knew in the core of your being you were a warm body.

I’ve worked in the gig economy. It doesn’t pay well and most gig jobs are dead ends. Due to the lack of benefits, almost no gig jobs are good jobs.

My Final Opinion

This isn’t the kind of math you can take to the bank, but in my opinion, only about 10% of American workers have good jobs.

Some people have more than one bad job. In fact, it’s pretty likely if you have two or three jobs, they suck.

Many workers are too young to know the difference, and many of us who are older have compromised and found jobs we can tolerate. At a certain age, you get less picky because you recognize you need benefits or need to stay employed in the city where you want to live.

All of us should be proud of ourselves for enduring bad jobs. We keep the economy going and keep providing services.

Having a bad job isn’t a sign you are doing anything wrong. If you get a good job, consider it a lottery win.

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Jean Campbell is based in Hot Springs, Arkansas. She has been writing on Medium for years and recently published her first novel, Down and Out on the Road South, with Wings ePress. She is serializing the first part of her second book, City of Lies, on Substack.