New reports assess fate of high-skill jobs, minimum-wage workers
Even as the job market tightens and unemployment declines, the recent recession has yet another blow to deliver to the labor economy - one that may not be felt for several years.
Even as the job market tightens and unemployment declines, the recent recession has yet another blow to deliver to the labor economy - one that may not be felt for several years.
"We may not be able to provide a good number of jobs for highly skilled people," said economist Efua Afful at Moody's Analytics in West Chester.
That is because research-and-development investment, which leads to innovation and employment for highly skilled workers, plummeted during the recession and has yet to rebound, she said.
In the short term, demand for highly skilled employees will continue as they work through innovations developed earlier, but "our potential output will be lower," Afful said.
In her report, she noted that a lack of research investment will likely also discourage entrepreneurship as fewer highly skilled innovators are available to spin off their own companies and begin hiring.
"The most productive industries are not yielding a net positive of new jobs that require a high level of skills, constraining productivity and wage growth," she wrote. "High-wage jobs are growing at a slower pace than low-wage jobs."
Afful's analysis came the same day that Pennsylvania's Department of Labor and Industry delivered its annual report on workers affected by the minimum wage.
In 2015, 151,000 Pennsylvania employees earned minimum wage or less, about 6,200 fewer than the prior year.
That is because 19,800 people who earned the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour in 2014 moved up in pay, but that increase was offset by an increase in the number who earned less than the minimum wage, up by 13,600.
All the states surrounding Pennsylvania have seen increases in the minimum wage. Legislation to increase Pennsylvania's minimum wage to $10.10 remains in committee in Harrisburg.
The majority of minimum-wage earners statewide tend to be female, white, between the age of 16 to 24, with a high school education or less, and never married.
Almost half work in food-service jobs. In Pennsylvania, minimum wage for tipped employees is $2.83 an hour, which has not been raised since 1998.
A minimum-wage full-time employee can earn above the federal poverty line, but it is not enough to raise a family of two out of poverty, the Labor Department report said.
"The report makes it clear that the minimum wage has lost its purchasing power over the years," said Nadia Hewka, a lawyer at Community Legal Services and a member of the state's Minimum Wage Advisory Board.
"People who make the minimum wage are struggling," she said. "Really, you need to make a lot more than the poverty level to have a decent life."
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