Job Quality
By several measures the quality of Pennsylvania’s jobs has declined in recent years.
- Pennsylvania’s inflation-adjusted median hourly wage fell slightly in 2003 to $13.59, 4 cents per hour below its level in both 2001 and 2002 and 3 cents per hour below the national median wage.
- Pennsylvania men’s wages fell from $15.50 in 2000 and $15.67 in 2001 to $15.21 in 2003.
- The wages of low-wage workers (defined as those who earn more than 10 percent of workers and less than 90 percent of workers) declined from $7.12 per hour in 2001 and $7.09 per hour in 2002 to $7.07 per hour in 2003.
- The average wage of production workers in Pennsylvania manufacturing was lower in July 2004 than in July of any of the three previous years. At $15.08, it was nearly a dollar per hour below the average U.S. manufacturing wage of $16.05 per hour.
- Since the beginning of the recession in Pennsylvania, sectors with lower wages have added jobs and sectors with higher wages have lost jobs. The nonagricultural industries whose wages exceeded the statewide average annual wage in 2002 lost a total of 5.3 percent of their jobs, while those whose wages were below the statewide average increased their employment by 2.9 percent.
- The share of workers employed part-time for “economic reasons” is one measure of the economy’s ability to generate full-time work for all who want it. Although lower than in the nation as a whole, this percentage rose from 10.2 percent in 2000 (before the recession) to 11.9 percent in 2003. The national jump was much larger, from 10.8 percent to 14.7 percent.
- From 1999 to 2003 (the most recent year for which data are available) the number of Pennsylvanians without health insurance jumped 40 percent, from 989,000 to 1.38 million. The uninsured increased from 8.3 percent to 11.4 percent of the state’s population. Both the number and share of Pennsylvanians without health insurance were higher in 2003 than in any year since 1987, the earliest year for which comparable Census data on health coverage are available.
- Poverty in Pennsylvania increased substantially since 2000 and 2003, especially for children. The share of children in poverty increased from 11.6 to 15.5 from 2000 to 2003, a jump of one third. From 2002 to 2003, the share of children in poverty increased from 13.8 percent to 15.5 percent. The share of adults in poverty increased from 8.5 percent to 10.5 percent between 2000 and 2003.
Wage Gaps
Some wage gaps have widened in Pennsylvania since 2000 and others have narrowed slightly. The state has made long-term progress in narrowing the gender wage gap but gaps between top and bottom earners and between African Americans and whites remain much larger than in 1979.
- The wage gap between high- and low-wage earners in Pennsylvania narrowed slightly in 2003 but remained higher than in 2000 and much higher than in the late 1970s. In 2003 high-wage earners earned 426 percent of what low-wage earners did, down slightly from 431 percent in 2002 but up dramatically from 335 percent in 1979.
- The wage gap between men and women in Pennsylvania has been narrowing slowly, but this has come about partly because men’s wages have fallen. In 2003 women earned 80 cents per hour for every dollar earned by men, up from 79 cents in 2002 and 71 cents in 1989.
- African Americans of both sexes generally received smaller raises (or suffered larger wage cuts) than their white counterparts during most of the period from 1979-2003. In 2003 black men earned 79 cents per hour for every dollar earned by white men, down from 86 cents in 1979. In 2003 black women earned 88 cents for every dollar earned by white women, down from 98 cents in 1979.
More about job quality and wages can be found on pages 18-24 of the full State of Working Pennsylvania 2004.
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