By JOAN PATTERSON

On April 19, thousands of the nation’s unemployed stepped into McDonald’s fast-food restaurants across the country during the company’s National Hiring Day, a campaign to employ up to 50,000 new workers for what are mostly low-wage jobs. In Las Vegas, which has more than 100 McDonald’s franchises, the plan was to hire about 500 workers.

According to government statistics we are in a recovery — slow though it may be. We lost 8.8 million private-sector jobs in the recession and have regained about 1.3 million. But are the jobs that are coming on line, in fact, disproportionately leaning toward the low-end of the pay scale and, if so, is this something we’re going to have to get used to for a while?

If you look at recent job growth, high-wage industries seem to be struggling. While this may not seem so unusual in an economic recovery, the imbalance in this particular recession is more prominent than in the past.

According to a study released earlier this year by a labor-advocacy group called the National Employment Law Project (NELP) called “A Year of Unbalanced Growth: Industries, Wages, and the First 12 Months of Job Growth After the Great Recession,” 23 percent of the current recession’s job losses have occurred in lower-wage industries. Yet, 49 percent of the country’s recent job growth as we inch toward recovery has occurred in the lower-wage sector as well.

Midwage industries made up 37 percent of the job growth which is about even with the percentage of midwage jobs that have been lost. But higher-wage industries — which have had a 40 percent job loss during the current recession — experienced a mere 14 percent job growth.

According to the study, which looks at Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data, high-wage industries are considered those that pay hourly wages of approximately $19 to $31 per hour; midwage, $13 to $19 per hour; and lower-wage, $9 to $13 per hour.

“You can definitely see that we are missing, relative to the 2001 recession, at least to date, we are definitely missing growth in higher-wage industries and also to some extent midwage industries. So while in general, yes, you would expect some of the lower-wage service industries like retail and restaurants potentially to come back a little bit faster, that pattern is highly accentuated in this early recovery,” noted Annette Bernhardt, NELP policy co-director and co-author of the study.

What cannot be forgotten is that this recession was created by both the collapse of the housing bubble and the crash in the financial sector. There also were trends already in place such as the decline in manufacturing, according to the NELP study.

In fact, the industries that have been hardest hit in terms of job losses include construction; finance and insurance; nondurable manufacturing in areas such as printing and chemicals, petroleum and food manufacturing; and information such as telecommunications, which was experiencing a decline even before the recession, according to the study.

On the other hand, the industries that have gained jobs include durable manufacturing which, in many cases, has begun to increase hiring after significant downsizing. These sectors include the auto industry, metal products and machinery. Health services, retail trade, waste management and remediation services, as well as administrative and support services, have also seen gains. Most of the growth in this last area has come from increased hiring in the lower-paying temporary services industry, a trend not specific to this recession, according to Bernhardt.

“It is true, in general … that early in a recession you see more growth in the temp industry and the general dynamic here is employers are a little skittish about taking on permanent employees,” she said. “So early in a recovery they’ll start by hiring temp workers, and then as the recovery accelerates and gains steam they’ll increasingly either convert those temp workers to permanent workers or just hire permanent workers directly.”

Las Vegas is currently part of this trend toward temporary employment.

Amber Fontaine, the local district manager for Kelly Services, notes that the company has seen an uptick in the demand for temporary workers as businesses in the Las Vegas area look for that wiggle room that will allow them to either sustain or increase services and production, while at the same time avoid the larger financial investment in permanent employees.

The areas that she is seeing an increase in demand are IT or information technology, engineering, and call center and convention work. Demand for convention work, in fact, has risen about 30 percent during the past year as bookings get back on track after the worst of the recession.

Although in some cases the nature of the positions has changed, too. Businesses, for example, are more interested in project engineers who tend to work shorter assignments rather than those who are with the company for long stretches. “A lot of that has to do with companies trying to see where they’re going to be,” Fontaine said.

She notes that businesses are looking “quarter to quarter” to make sure they are sustaining growth or stability. But this cautious approach has also led to an increase in Kelly’s contract-to-hire positions, whether it be positions such as accountants or receptionists, she said.

“They may bring them on initially thinking it will be a short-term assignment, and then when you start seeing that, OK, things are staying the same … we’re steadily increasing, our profits are looking good, then they’re converting those employees over,” she said.

The pool of temporary workers has changed as well to include more highly skilled employees.

“Because of the recession you’ve seen so many people that you never would have thought would have gotten laid off and you’re looking at their experience and they’re so high caliber … You’ve got a vast, very diverse pool of candidates than you may have had, or we’ve had, in times past,” Fontaine said.

And then there are those in this recession who are using temporary employment as a way to retool their skills and even change career paths, even if it means less pay. “So now they’ve broadened their horizons a little bit, and now they can just kind of make sure, OK, I made this career change, or this industry change, is this really what I want to do?” Fontaine said.

Nevada may be in a position where any new jobs are welcome, whether low-paying or not, with an unemployment rate that has been leading the nation. Although the most recent figures do reflect a slow, consecutive recovery with the unemployment rate falling since the beginning of the year. April’s rate, for example, was 12.5 percent compared to 13.2 percent in March. This is in contrast to April of 2010 when we had a jobless rate of 14.9 percent, according to the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation.

The state’s major industry, leisure and hospitality, has been leading the uptick as visitor volume increases. In April there were statewide job gains in accommodation and food services at workplaces such as hotel-casinos, restaurants and bars. In March, leisure and hospitality jobs came in at about 5,300 higher than they did the same month in 2010, according to DETR Chief Economist Bill Anderson.

There is no way to tell what specific jobs within the hospitality industry are getting filled so whether this is primarily driven by lower-wage, less-skilled positions is still a question mark, Anderson notes.

“It’s just too early to be able to tabulate where those jobs are coming from. Whether they’re from line-type jobs that deal directly with customers or whether they’re back office kinds of jobs. … My guess is that these positions are driven by increases in visitor volume so it is quite likely that they are front-line positions that would be dealing directly with customers,” he said.

Experts do point out that the significant downturn in construction during the recession, what was also a leading employer in the state, meant the loss of thousands of jobs that carried mid- to high-level salaries.

“Part of falling wages has to do with people moving into new fields, and as they become more skilled in that field maybe their wages will go up some. So that’s part of what’s going on,” said University of Nevada, Las Vegas economics professor Jeff Waddoups. “Of course, there are some industries that are higher paying than others. Construction tended to be kind of a high-paying industry and so other industries for various reasons won’t be as high paying.”

Stephen Brown, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at UNLV, notes that even prior to the recession lower-paying jobs were on the rise in this country. It may have been masked in Nevada during the boom years because, again, industries such as construction were “very well paying,” he said.

He also points out that the educational attainment in Nevada is slightly above the national average so there are obviously a good number of workers in highly skilled jobs. The casino industry, he adds, does provide opportunities to those with advanced degrees and these are usually employees who are well-compensated.

At the same time, both Brown and Waddoups point out that the lack of diversification in Nevada makes it more reliant on, and vulnerable to, its major industry: leisure and hospitality.

“I’ve been here for 20 years and they’ve been talking about diversifying and it’s not happening … job growth will still be in hospitality,” Waddoups said.

Brown sees the diversification coming, however. He believes the state will either be heading in that direction or have reached that point in the next 15 to 20 years with industries in the areas such as biotechnology and warehousing. In the meantime, lower-paying jobs, whether they are fueling the national economic recovery or even the turnaround in Nevada, can still provide opportunities.

“It is better to have some growth than no growth at all. Low-paying jobs do give people job experience and can become stepping stones to higher-paying jobs,” he said.

Even Bernhardt points out that we are already seeing some changes. Since her report came out in February, there have been signs that certain higher-wage industries are on the upswing including professional business and technical services, civil engineering, construction and health care, which has been experiencing consistent growth for a while.

She also points out that the growth in lower-paying jobs — including retail, restaurants, temporary employment and lower-wage health care positions such as home health aide — compared to higher-wage positions is not necessarily going to permanently take over the recovery. It’s just that at this point, they are certainly the ones making the biggest noise.

“Some of (the lower-wage industries) are actually growing slower than they were in the last recession, but because so many industries are still struggling to even grow at all and because some of those low-wage sectors are really big — like retail and restaurants are just these huge industries — even though they’re not growing quite as fast as they were the last time around they’re still adding tons and tons of jobs. So it’s partly just through the sheer size of low-wage service industries that you’re getting this effect.”

“In general,” she adds, “our economy still has a jobs deficit of 11 million jobs that are missing that we need to backfill and create, and so to me it’s that jobs deficit more than anything else that is really symptomatic of what unemployed workers are up against.”