How To Bring Back Good Jobs To America

As we've been reporting on AOL Jobs this week, the U.S. has become something of a crappy jobs nation. Low-wage jobs in fast food and retail are on the rise, while mid-wage work is dwindling. At the same time, full-time employees with benefits are being shafted in favor of contractors, part-timers, and temps.

This is depressing. So to lighten the tone, in this week's edition of AOL Jobs' Lunchtime Live weekly video series we tried to answer the question: "How do we solve the crappy jobs crisis?" We were joined by Martin Rafanan, the community director of STL735 Can't Survive on $7.35, a low-wage worker advocacy group in St. Louis, Elise Gould, a researcher at the liberal think tank the Economic Policy Institute, and career coach extraordinaire and AOL Jobs contributor Marty Nemko.

Ideas included teaching entrepreneurship in schools, funding workers with tax dollars to do infrastructure projects, and raising the minimum wage. But there was plenty of disagreement.

"Everybody intuitively feels like, of course, we should raise the minimum wage to a living wage. Probably to $20 an hour, that's still not going to make people live high on the hog," said Nemko. "We'd all like that, it feels instinctively right. But the unvarnished truth is that many, many millions of Americans don't add even minimum wage value to an employer."

Watch the full half hour segment on YouTube here.