SHARE Click to enlarge

By of the

Wisconsin employment in low-wage occupations has increased markedly since 2000, with the growth accelerating since 2010, a new study by University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Marc Levine finds.

Jobs in middle-wage occupations, meanwhile, decreased, especially during the recession. Employment in high-wage occupations has risen overall since 2000, but far less than low-wage jobs.

"We've had a long-term trend now of proliferation of employment in low-wage occupations," said Levine, who teaches in the history department and urban studies programs, and is founding director of UWM's Center for Economic Development. "This isn't something that started in 2010 by any means. It's been going on through the decade."

Levine found that in 2000, low-wage occupations accounted for 24.5% of Wisconsin's jobs, and middle-wage occupations for 52.4%.

But by 2013, low-wage occupations made up 30.7% of the state's employment. Middle-wage occupations had shrunk to 45.1%.

High-wage occupations represented 24.3% of employment, up slightly from 23.2% in 2000.

Levine's analysis draws on data from the federal Occupational Employment Statistics program. It tallies employment and pay by the jobs people actually do, not the industries in which they work.

That approach offers a key advantage for tracking changes in the workforce. In the occupational data, a short-order cook is always counted as a short-order cook. In industry-based data, he's counted as an employee of the type of business where he works, whether it's a limited-service restaurant or a biotech research firm.

Levine divided Wisconsin occupations — there are about 750 of them — into three groups based on their median wage. The median is the midpoint — half the workers in the occupation are paid more, half are paid less.

In the study, "low-wage occupations" have a median wage of $12.50 an hour or less, "middle-wage occupations" have a median of $12.51 to $25, and "high-wage occupations" have a median above $25.

Levine counted the number of jobs in each wage bracket as of May 2000, May 2007, May 2010 and May 2013, the most recent year for which data is available. He adjusted wages for inflation, expressing all of them in 2013 dollars.

From 2000 to 2007, jobs in low-wage occupations rose by 55,000, while the middle tier shed 35,000 jobs.

Both categories lost jobs from 2007 to 2010. But the loss of 121,000 middle-tier jobs over that recessionary period dwarfed the decrease of 6,000 jobs in low-wage occupations.

Low-wage-occupation jobs bounced back in the recovery, rising by about 130,000 from 2010 to 2013. During that same period, middle-wage occupations lost 16,000 jobs.

"Since 2010, the recovery has been extraordinarily heavily weighted — all of the net growth in Wisconsin has been in the low-wage category," Levine said.

Some of that growth is from newly created low-wage jobs. But the lion's share has come from middle-wage occupations dropping into the lowest tier as their pay fell in inflation-adjusted terms.

Take, for example, the occupation titled "laborers and freight, stock, and material movers, hand." Its 42,750 jobs were classified as middle-wage in 2010, with median, inflation-adjusted pay of $13.03 an hour.

By 2013 the occupation had added about 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, and stood at 55,520. Meanwhile, median pay had fallen to $12.16 an hour, so all 55,000 jobs — the 13,000 new ones and the 42,000 that were "middle-wage" three years earlier — were classified as low-wage in 2013.

A smaller occupational group, "landscaping and groundskeeping workers," saw its numbers drop by about 1,000 over the period, to 14,950. Yet all of them moved from the middle tier in 2010 to the lowest in 2013, as the group's median, inflation-adjusted wage declined 17 cents, from $12.63 to $12.46 an hour.

Jobs in high-wage occupations increased by nearly 70,000 from 2000 to 2007, then fell during both the recession and recovery, Levine found.

The May 2010 to May 2013 period overlaps the administration of Republican Scott Walker, whose economic performance Levine sharply criticized in an opinion article in late June. The current study does not mention Walker.

Asked about the timing of the study's publication — less than two weeks before a hotly contested gubernatorial election — Levine said he had no political motivation in releasing the research.

"This is a topic on which I've been writing, researching, and publishing for 20 years," he said via email.

Levine's findings of extensive middle-wage job losses during the recession and large gains in low-paying jobs in the recovery mirror nationwide findings of the National Law Employment Project, a research and advocacy group for low-wage workers and the unemployed.

Dale Knapp, research director for the nonpartisan Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance and a former state labor market economist, said Levine's work was interesting.

"This confirms something that I have noticed over the years (dating back to the early 2000s) when looking at DWD projections," Knapp said in an email, referring to the state Department of Workforce Development. "Much of the job growth was projected to be in low-wage jobs. That appears to be happening and will likely continue."

Abdur Chowdhury, an economics professor at Marquette University, said in an email that Levine's Wisconsin study "confirms what we have found for the U.S. national economy."

"Since the Great Recession, and especially over the last few years, wage growth has been relatively flat. This has happened while several million jobs have been created. This indicates that the jobs have been mostly in low-skill, low-wage areas."

John Heywood, an economics professor at UWM who specializes in labor economics, said via email that the occupational statistics Levine used work better for analyzing job growth than does industry data.

"Variation within an industry by occupation can be enormous (the bank secretary and CEO are in the same industry)," Heywood said. "There is some variation in earnings by occupation, but it is far smaller.

"It could also be the case that the job increase could be happening at one end or the other of a particular category. Nonetheless, as a rough approximation and given the data, this seems very reasonable."