PA Wages Climb

The hourly pay rate of low-wage employees climbed to $6.05 an hour in 1999, marking the fourth consecutive year of inflation-adjusted growth. So reports the Keystone Research Center in it annual economic report card, The State of Working Pennsylvania 2000.

Low-wage employees (defined as those earning more than 10 percent but less than 90 percent of all Pennsylvania employees) saw their wages plummet from $6.78 an hour in 1979 to $5.63 an hour in 1995. Due to the growth of the past 4 years, low-wage employees have recovered about one-third of the ground lost over the previous 15 years.

The decline in wages for low-skill jobs is the primary reason food insecurity has remained such a stubborn problem in Pennsylvania over the past two decades.

Another measure of the adequacy of hourly earnings is whether full-time, full-year workers are earning enough to lift a family of four above the poverty line. According to Keystone, in 1999 that pay rate was $8.19 an hour and 25 percent of Pennsylvania employees made less than that. That was a slight improvement over 1995 when 27 percent of workers earned less than the poverty wage.

Stephen Herzenberg, Keystone Executive Director, emphasized the fragile quality of recent gains. "From the viewpoint of working people, the economy is in better health but it's still frail. If we want to avoid a relapse into 'growing apart' the way Pennsylvania did from 1980 to 1995, now is the time to enact policies that would allow us to grow together over the long term."

For a copy of the report, contact Keystone at KeystoneRC@aol.com.