Then you are doing better than almost half the workers in America. Via NYT:

The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics offers a rough estimate of the imbalance in the demand for jobs as opposed to the supply. Each month since December 2000, it has surveyed the number of job vacancies across the country and compared it with the number of unemployed job seekers. On average, there were 2.6 job seekers for every job opening over the first 41 months of the survey. That ratio would have been even higher, according to the bureau, if the calculation had included the millions of people who stopped looking for work because they did not believe that they could get decent jobs.

So the demand for jobs is considerably greater than the supply, and the supply is not what the reigning theory says it is. Most of the unfilled jobs pay low wages and require relatively little skill, often less than the jobholder has. From the spring of 2003 to the spring of 2004, for example, more than 55 percent of the hiring was at wages of $13.25 an hour or less: hotel and restaurant workers, health care employees, temporary replacements and the like.

That trend is likely to continue. Seven of the 10 occupations expected to grow the fastest from 2002 through 2012, according to the Labor Department, pay less than $13.25 an hour, on average: retail salesclerks, customer service representatives, food service workers, cashiers, janitors, nurse's aides and hospital orderlies.

From an excerpt from an upcoming book, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences by Louis Uchitelle, an economics writer for The New York Times. Depressing as shit, but go read it anyway.

They could have cut this quite a bit; the details of the United airlines aircraft refurbishment plant in Indiana are interesting but not exactly on point. The blame-the-workers-who-were-so-stupid-as-to-expect-respect along with top wages I could have done without too.

But the picture here is of the stratification, not the stratosphere. We are becoming two Americas indeed, and the once mighty middle class is getting mighty thin in between the two.

The $13.25 threshold is important. More than 45 percent of the nation's workers, whatever their skills, earned less than $13.25 an hour in 2004, or $27,600 a year for a full-time worker. That is roughly the income that a family of four must have in many parts of the country to maintain a standard of living minimally above the poverty level. Surely lack of skill and education does not hold down the wages of nearly half the work force.

Something quite different seems to be true: the oversupply of skilled workers is driving people into jobs beneath their skills and driving down the pay of jobs equal to their skills.

What was that quote the other day by Treasury Secretary Snow(job)? Something about how "market forces are doing an adequate job" determining the pay of CEOs. Wonder what the CEO of United Airlines got last year?