FORTUNE – Not to add to the gloom of today’s job market, but the problems U.S. workers face go beyond high unemployment. Even if the economy “magically recovered” tomorrow that doesn’t necessarily mean workers will be better off, said Harvard University economist Lawrence Katz at the Economist Buttonwood Gathering Thursday.
In a panel discussion called “The Jobless Era,” Katz listed challenges workers will have to confront over the next several years. Aside from high unemployment (which some don’t expect to fall back to normal until 2017), younger workers will likely have to pay for years of a bad economy. Katz says two-thirds of earnings growth in a worker’s career happens during their first 10 years in the working world. Younger workers have already had to deal with about four or five bad years. So while protesters of Occupy Wall Street are screaming about high tuition, joblessness and huge student debts, add the consequences of pay and getting a late start in the working world onto the list.
Nevertheless, the young and educated are the lucky ones. Katz adds traditional “middle class jobs” of 30 to 40 years ago – whether they were high-waged jobs in manufacturing for non-college workers or middle management or clerical jobs – have been disappearing. Even if the job market returned to normal, these jobs aren’t expected to return as the labor market continues to demand highly skilled workers.
No wonder they call it the lost generation.
