A new paper from economists Adam Ozimek, John Lettieri, and Benjamin Glasner from the Economic Innovation Group asks readers to consider one narrative about the labor market:

It goes something like this: Workers are experiencing an age of unprecedented disruption. The rise of e-commerce and automation, increasing foreign competition, and the proliferation of gig platforms have upended the typical employer-employee relationship and the stability that workers used to enjoy. As a result, more workers are taking on side gigs or cobbling together multiple part-time jobs just to get by. Not only that, but even good jobs are more precarious than in previous eras. Back when manufacturing ruled the U.S. economy, workers could expect a job for life. Today, they are forced to switch jobs more often than ever before.

It’s common to hear a narrative like this from people on the political left and right, and in apolitical settings as well. Maybe you think this characterization is true. Maybe you think parts of it are true and parts of it are false.

Ozimek, Lettieri, and Glasner go through the actual data on these topics, and more, and find that this popular account is entirely false. That’s not to say the labor market is perfect. It is to say that policy should not be made on false premises, and that’s a risk we run if policy-makers believe this narrative.

Here are the facts, from the paper:

All of this isn’t some kind of data-gaming from economists who are disconnected from workers’ actual experience. Surveys of workers find job satisfaction to be high:

This narrative is adjacent to another major false narrative about the labor market: that pay and productivity are no longer linked, and that pay has stagnated for decades. Last month, I wrote about a paper by Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute that corrects that narrative and instead finds that the correlation between pay and productivity remains very strong. Productivity inequality and changing social norms around work have more to do with labor-market changes in the past few decades.

Policy-makers must not work from false narratives when making policy. That will lead them to wrongheaded conclusions that would make things worse. Building on success is a different task from correcting failure. There has been a whole lot of success over time in the U.S. labor market, and it shows in workers’ own opinions of their jobs. Don’t screw it up.