Wages in Bexar County up, but lag far behind other Texas...

Wages in Bexar County are growing faster than the national average but still lag behind wages statewide and in other Texas metros, new federal data show.

The average weekly wage earned in Bexar County was $965 during the third quarter of 2019 — 3.8 percent higher than the same period a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Over the last decade, workers in Bexar County on average have seen weekly wages increase by 2.5 percent annually.

Even so, workers in Harris, Dallas and Travis counties — which encompass Houston, Dallas and Austin, respectively — earn on average $1,300 a week.

Statewide, the average weekly wage in Texas was $1,109, 12th highest in the country.

The lower cost of living in San Antonio offsets at least some part of the wage gap with other Texas cities, economists said.

And the stable nature of the military and the health care industry — two of the primary employers in San Antonio — can constrain wage growth compared with more lucrative sectors, such as high tech or oil and gas extraction.

“If you’re employed in the military, you’re not going to see a large year-over-year wage gain, and I think the same is true in health care,” said Thomas Tunstall, director of research at the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Institute for Economic Development.

Tunstall noted the growth of San Antonio’s cybersecurity industry as a driver of wage gains but said Austin’s more robust technology industry is part of the significant wage gap between the two cities.

“People talk about (information technology) like it’s a generic thing, but IT is a lot of different activities,” he said. “Austin has a lot more application development and higher-end paying activities going on there than does San Antonio.”

The number of people employed in Bexar County grew by 1.2 percent between the third quarter of 2019 and the same period a year earlier — adding roughly 10,500 jobs.

That employment growth was modest relative to other counties in Texas, but San Antonio’s historically low 3 percent unemployment rate is contributing to the wage gains and signifies the tight local labor market, economists said.

“That’s really low,” David Macpherson, chairman of Trinity University’s economics department, said of unemployment. “It’s hard to have a lot of employment growth if you’ve got very few unemployed people.”

The Texas economy broadly remains one of the strongest in the country. Texas saw a relatively healthy 4.1 percent wage growth, compared with 3.6 percent nationally, and only California added more jobs in the year preceding September.

“The Texas economy is booming,” Macpherson said “There’s business-friendly regulations, and a lot of things are going on that are helping the Texas economy.”

But wages in border counties remained among the lowest in the state. In Hidalgo County, which encompasses McAllen and Edinburg, the average weekly wage was just $683. In El Paso County, workers on average made $756 a week.

Wages in Midland and Ector counties, buoyed by the oil and gas industry, remained some of the highest in the state. In Midland, workers earned more than $1,400 a week.

But amid an industrywide slowdown in the oil and gas sector, employment declined in Ector County, where Odessa is, while employment grew by just half a percent in Midland County between September 2018 and September 2019.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics report included data from the nation’s 355 most populous counties.

Wages in Williamson County, north of Austin, grew the most among Texas counties. Workers there saw weekly wages jump 12 percent to $1,143.

Meanwhile, workers in Santa Clara County, Calif., south of San Francisco, earned on average more than $2,400 weekly — the highest among the 355 counties.

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