The idea didn’t start with Gov. Gina M. Raimondo, but it certainly has become a more prominent part of the discussion these days.
Bringing high-paying jobs to the Ocean State is the focus of so much of the state’s economic-development efforts. Yet one gets the feeling that many Rhode Islanders are not enamored of the effort. They see the courting of large, national companies with highly educated (and highly paid) employees as a turning away from the state’s current residents and the enterprises that employ them.
But a look at the composition of the state’s workforce makes clear that for Rhode Island to build a more robust economic future, the nature of the jobs here has got to change.
According to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data from May 2016 (the most recent available), two-thirds of those working in the Providence-Warwick-Fall River metropolitan area had average annual wages less than the regional average of $51,100. And the average of those 376,070 jobs was $36,803 per year.
By comparison, the average wage of those 189,220 who earn more than the regional mean was $79,443, more than double what those lower on the income scale pull in per year.
In fact, the largest three occupation groups in the region – office and administrative support, food preparation and serving related, and sales and related occupations – have average annual wages of $38,870, $25,260 and $42,800, respectively. And those three occupation groups – all with average wages below the region’s average – account for more workers than all the highly paid occupations.
Looked at another way, the total wages earned by those in the upper one-third of the distribution was $15 billion. Those in the lower two-thirds: $13.8 billion.
It seems obvious that having more people who earn more would create a more dynamic local economy. The question is, how will Rhode Island get there?
