The following poll result surprised me:
Th[e] desire for more income does not stop 86 percent of Americans from professing themselves completely (42 percent) or somewhat (44 percent) satisfied with their jobs. Equally important as they face a return to the daily grind, 69 percent are completely satisfied with their relations with their co-workers, probably a higher percentage than were satisfied with the relatives they visited this weekend.
Irwin Stelzer reports those numbers in his latest column for the online Weekly Standard. The paragraph quoted above represented the good news.
The bad news is that a new survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of workers feel less secure in their jobs than a decade ago. Fully 77 percent say that outsourcing hurts American workers in general, and 31 percent tell the Pew pollsters that their jobs can be handled by workers overseas–an unnerving prospect. And consumer confidence has recently declined at the fastest pace since the days following Hurricane Katrina one year ago.
So we like our jobs, but we’re not sure we’ll be able to keep them.
