The Tyranny of the Low-Quality Job: Kathryn Anne Edwards

For decades, a job has been seen as the key to escaping poverty. A major new study turns the question on its head: What if hardship is the result of employment, as opposed to the absence of it?

The American Job Quality Study, a survey of 18,000 US workers published earlier this month by the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, is the most comprehensive picture of job quality ever produced. And the results are not pretty: Just 40% of Americans say they have a “quality job.”

No doubt many workers will shrug this off as obvious, if not an ...