Americans Fret About Quality Jobs As Much As Job Quantity

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

As the American jobs situation has slightly improved, people have become more concerned about the quality of the jobs that can get. That appears to mean people believe that jobs can be gotten at all. A year or two ago, even that hope was nearly lost.

Gallup reports that of those surveyed,  ‘Eighty-seven percent say it is now a “bad time” to find a quality job, while 12% think it is a “good time.”‘

Unfortunately, for those who want some direction from the research, the term “quality job” is subjective and therefore poorly defined.

Overall, the results should be considered good news. Poor quality jobs are at least a way for people to earn income in a world in which many people still struggle, perhaps less each month, to locate work. Perhaps some of the despair linked with very high unemployment has begun to dissipate even if people believe that the work they want is not available, and must be replaced by the work they need.

Methodology: Results for all Americans are based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 15-18, 2011, with a random sample of 1,019 national adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

Douglas A.McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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