Does Recovery Mean New Jobs at Lower Pay?

This is something I've been worried about:

Career Shift Often Means Drop in Living Standards, by Catherine Rampell, NYTimes: ...A new study of American workers displaced by the recession sheds light on the sacrifices a large number have made to find work. Many, it turns out, had to switch careers and significantly reduce their living standards. ...

The study, conducted ... at Rutgers, was based on a survey of Americans around the country who were unemployed as of August 2009... As of November 2010, only about one-third had found replacement jobs, either as full-time workers (26 percent) or as part-time workers not wanting a full-time job (8 percent).

And of those who successfully found work, 41 percent had switched into a new career or field. ... Nearly 7 in 10 of the survey’s respondents who took jobs in new fields say they had to take a cut in pay, compared with just 45 percent of workers who successfully found work in their original field.

Of all the newly re-employed..., 29 percent took a reduction in fringe benefits in their new job. Again, those switching careers had to sacrifice more...

From June:

Where Will the Good Jobs Come From?: I have emphasized short-run job creation quite a bit recently, and I have noted, implicitly at least, that we shouldn't be too picky about the quality of the jobs that are created. Most jobs will do.

But in the long-run the quality of jobs matters a lot, and when the private sector finally begins reabsorbing the unemployed, the underemployed, and the discouraged, we want people to be able to find jobs with decent wages and benefits -- jobs that are as good or better than the jobs they had before.

But where, exactly, will those jobs come from? I wish I had the answer.

Education is part of it, better education means better jobs on average, and it's easy to imagine a substantial fraction of the population benefiting from an educational advantage. So I won't back off prior calls to improve education at all levels.

But even if we substantially improve education, it won't fully solve the problem. There will still be a need for quality jobs that are not all that dependent upon knowledge based skills. However, it's harder to imagine an emerging set of industries that will provide the large number of quality jobs that we need to replace those lost from industries in decline.

If these jobs fail to be created in the next years and decades, the result will be an ever widening gap in the distribution of income with, as now, a group at the top doing relatively well, and everyone else treading water at best.