Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry touts his job creation record as governor of Texas, but the reality is that new Texas-style jobs are low-wage jobs. Writing on RobertReich.org, University of California, Berkeley, professor and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich says even though Texas leads the nation in job growth, a majority of Texas’ workforce is paid hourly wages rather than salaries. And the median hourly wage there was $11.20, compared with the national median of $12.50 an hour. Reich adds:

Texas has also been specializing in minimum-wage jobs. From 2007 to 2010, the number of minimum wage workers there rose from 221,000 to 550,000—that’s an increase of nearly 150 percent. And 9.5 percent of Texas workers earn the minimum wage or below—compared to about 6 percent for the rest of the nation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state also has the highest percentage of workers without health insurance. Texas schools rank 44th in the nation in per-pupil spending.

The kind of job creation that Perry and other Republican candidates like Michele Bachmann are pushing—low wages, busting unions and failing to aggressively enforce health and safety laws—is not the way out of our economic mess, Reich says.

Besides, how can lower incomes possibly be an answer to America’s economic problem? Lower incomes mean less overall demand for goods and services—which translates into even fewer jobs and even lower wages.

In short, the Perry (and Bachmann) model of job growth condemns Americans to lower and lower living standards. That’s nothing to crow about.

Read the entire post, “How to Create More Jobs by Lowering Wages: Texas and America,” here.