On the One Hand, 216,000 New Jobs; On the Other Hand, the Pay Stinks

Jobs as Lays potato chips. Bet you can't live on just one.

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Job Growth Suggests Resilience of U.S. Recovery. (The New York Times, 4/1/2011)

Excerpt:   The United States economy showed signs of kicking into gear in March, as the Labor Department reported Friday that it added 216,000 jobs and knocked the unemployment rate down another jot, to 8.8 percent.


Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs. (The New York Times, 3/31/2011)

Excerpt:   The Labor Department will release its monthly snapshot of the job market on Friday, and economists expect it to show that the nation’s employers added about 190,000 jobs in March. With an unemployment rate that has been stubbornly stuck near 9 percent, those workers could be considered lucky.

But many of the jobs being added in retail, hospitality and home health care, to name a few categories, are unlikely to pay enough for workers to cover the cost of fundamentals like housing, utilities, food, health care, transportation and, in the case of working parents, child care.  [Emphasis added.]

A separate report being released Friday tries to go beyond traditional measurements like the poverty line and minimum wage to show what people need to earn to achieve a basic standard of living.

So which one of the above is the April Fool's Day story?