Labor is losing ground, annual 'State of Working Florida' report shows

By Jeff Harrington, Times Staff Writer
In Print: Monday, September 7, 2009

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For the working stiff, the one whom Labor Day was meant to honor, this is a great day to get away from it all. But based on a statewide analysis coming out today, the celebration may be restrained.

In their annual "State of Working Florida" report, researchers at Florida International University paint a sobering picture of the labor market. Wages are stagnant; costs are up; jobs are hard to get, particularly for minorities and longtime unemployed.

The divide between the haves and have-nots has widened, with wages going up 37 percent for the wealthiest Floridians since 1979 and only 2.4 percent for the bottom tenth of wage earners.

The report says minority workers will continue to feel the most pain. It cites projections that the unemployment rate for African-Americans will have risen to 16.9 percent by the middle of 2010, compared with 13.4 percent for Hispanics and 10.4 percent for whites.

Meanwhile, the cost of living continues to surge, up about 25 percent in Florida over the last six years. Miami/Fort Lauderdale and Tampa/St. Petersburg rank second and third in the country, respectively, among metro markets that have seen the steepest increase in cost of living between 2002 and 2008.

In recent years, Florida had been on a roll narrowing the wage gap, coming closer to jobs paying what the average American makes. But in the last couple of years, that has leveled off, with Floridians making about 97 percent of the national median wage.

The bottom line is that we're losing ground. The FIU report concludes that all the job and wage gains of the state's boom years between 2004 and 2007 have been wiped out.

• Florida lost 255,000 jobs in 2008, or 3.2 percent of its work force, compared with the United States, which lost 0.4 percent of its employment.

• Florida ended the year with 7.76 million jobs, fewer jobs than existed in 2005.

• Between 2003 and 2006, Florida added 158,000 jobs; it has lost those gains and fallen below 2003 levels.

• The rate of African-Americans unemployed longer than 26 weeks is 30.6 percent. That compares with a long-term rate of 21.3 percent for whites.

• The median wage in Florida was relatively unchanged from 2007 to 2008, holding at 97 percent of the U.S. median.

• The wage gap between African-American and white workers has widened. In 1979, African-Americans earned 81.1 percent of what white workers earned in Florida; that dropped to 78.6 percent in 2008.

• In 2008, for the first time, median wages for African-Americans in Florida ($13.30 per hour) have surpassed those for African-Americans in the nation as a whole ($13.07 per hour).

Source: "The State of Working Florida 2009," Florida International University Center for Labor Research and Studies.

[Last modified: Sep 07, 2009 12:08 AM]

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