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Report says new O.C. jobs pay above-average wages
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But we're losing manufacturing and information jobs, which paid better.
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October 1, 2004
By James B. Kelleher
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
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For several months now, the state Employment Development Department has reported
that Orange County employers aren't creating a lot of jobs.
Whether the state is right or not is a matter of heated debate. A lot of economists
believe the agency's way of gathering data routinely undercounts jobs being created
by startup companies – something that ultimately gets rectified each February when
the EDD revises its numbers.
Only time will tell who's right: the state or the skeptical economists. In the meantime,
there's some good news about the local labor market from the normally skeptical economists
at UCLA.
Researchers there said Thursday that the jobs being created in the county pay
higher-than-average wages - something that isn't true elsewhere in Southern California counties.
The average wage for jobs being added in the county between March 2003 and July 2004
was $48,232, according to UCLA. That's almost $1,000 more than the overall average wage
for the county.
The reason: A lot of the jobs being created in the county are in finance, accounting
and business services, which pay higher wages. "When you look at the greater Los Angeles
area, especially the coastal part, Orange County is professional jobs central," said
Christopher Thornberg, a senior economist at UCLA, which released its updated forecast
for the region Thursday at an Irvine event that attracted 400 local business leaders.
The bad news? The jobs Orange County is losing - especially in the information and
manufacturing sectors - paid an average of $61,557, according to UCLA. Thornberg said
the state's status as a magnet for immigrants, who often are poorly educated, was
contributing to the trend. So, too, has the surge in debt-fueled consumer spending,
which has generated big job gains in the low-paying retail sector.
But Thornberg said a big culprit was the state's failure to invest in the "infrastructure
of education."
"We're going to have to deal with that," he said. "The people we're schooling today are
the people we'll be counting on to support us as a society 20, 30 years down the road."
Among the forecast's other predictions for the county:
Local payrolls will grow at an annual average rate of 2 percent over the next five years.
That represents an increase over the past two years - but well below the rate seen in 1999
and 2000, when payrolls grew at a 3.5 percent clip.
In all, local employers will create about 150,000 jobs over the next five years, with
especially strong growth in health care and professional and business services.
Total personal income will continue to grow faster than inflation, rising at a rate of
5.5 percent annually over the next five years.
Residential real estate prices will continue to rise in the county, albeit at a slower
pace, despite the fact that "affordability is a massive problem in Southern Orange County,"
says Mark Schniepp, the director of the California Economic Forecast.
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