LA Times, August 9, 2004
THE RACE TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Jobs Grow, Optimism Shrinks in Wisconsin
Displaced workers find new employment, but they're earning less in a service economy.
By Warren Vieth, Times Staff Writer
GREEN BAY, Wis. — For several months, the city known as "Titletown" — for its football prowess — has been earning recognition of a different sort. Green Bay was the nation's fifth-fastest-growing job market in June. The previous month, it tied Laredo, Texas, for first place.
But Steve Anderson sees little to celebrate.
"Supposedly there's a whole mess of new jobs being created, but they're not jobs we can live with," said Anderson, a 50-year-old factory worker whose career in manufacturing will come to an end today.
"Look at this," he said, leafing through a stack of recent job postings. "They're paying $9 an hour. Five years ago, it would have paid maybe $18…. This one is paying $12…. Here's one for $8.75…. These are the great new jobs that are opening up in Green Bay."
Anderson's frustration reflects a characteristic of the current recovery. Yes, the U.S. economy is creating new jobs. But to some of the workers who have been displaced during the downturn of the last three years, the new jobs look a lot worse than their old jobs.
Since December, Wisconsin has recovered all of the jobs it lost over the previous three years, turning a 76,000-job deficit into a net gain of 700.
But not all jobs are created equal. Although the lion's share of Wisconsin's losses were in the high-paying manufacturing sector, most of the gains have been in service industries with widely varying pay scales, some quite low.
In effect, the state has been swapping well-paying factory jobs for positions in restaurants, hotels, casinos, hospitals, banks, insurance firms and temp agencies.
The tectonic shifts within Wisconsin's labor force help explain why some workers are still feeling grumpy, despite six months of job growth. In manufacturing-intensive swing states such as Wisconsin, where George W. Bush trailed Al Gore by a mere 5,708 votes in 2000, the issue could pack a punch in this year's presidential race.
"The pain and suffering is a little more acute here," said Dennis K. Winters, vice president of NorthStar Economics in Madison, the state capital.
Nationwide, employers have added 1.5 million jobs since last August, restoring more than half of the 2.6 million lost during the first 2 1/2 years of President's Bush's term.
But new Labor Department figures released Friday called into question the strength of the recovery and returned job creation to the forefront of the election debate.
Employment growth slowed to an anemic 32,000 new payroll positions in July, and June's gain was revised down to 78,000 — far short of the 295,000 average of the previous three months.
The new numbers also brought attention to the nagging question of job quality: As the nation struggles to recover from the longest employment slump since World War II, are the new jobs as good as the jobs that were lost?
full: <http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/2004/la-na-wisconsin9aug09,1,1714529.story?coll=la-home-headlines>
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