>Is there any index that tracks the quality of jobs gained or
>lost? For instance, what's the average pay for the
>112,000 jobs added in January? What percentage of these jobs
>would land a worker in the middle class? Or does one make educated
>guesses based on the sector of the economy which produced the
>stats?
We can't really know from the monthly numbers, but since retail was the strongest sector (and it pays crap) and manufacturing has been shrinking for over three years (and it pays relatively well), and since average wage growth is quite weak, we can assume that most of the jobs gained weren't real career builders.
By the way, the strength in retail may be a seasonal quirk. Seasonal adjustment factors "expect" strong Xmas hiring in November and December, and post-Xmas layoffs in January. But since Xmas hiring was relatively weak, there were probably fewer layoffs than usual. After seasonal adjustment, fewer layoffs appears as more jobs. The new concurrent seasonal adjustment technique <http://www.bls.gov/ces/cescsa.htm> is supposed to handle this better than the old technique, but it ain't perfect.
Doug