County Narrows Wage Gap Programs Like Job Plus Bring Higher-Paying Jobs To The Area

The winter months are tough for Tony Traver and his family.

Traver, 21, who works full time as a valet, has a wife and 6-month-old son to support. His salary of $3.75 per hour plus tips translates to $6.50 per hour in the winter and $15 per hour in the summer.

“It’s either I get another job or she’ll go to work,” Traver said as he paged through job offerings at the unemployment office in Coeur d’Alene.

In the winter, there’s “not as many movies, not as much eating out,” Traver said. To make ends meet, he said, he borrows money from his parents.

Traver is not alone.

A study unveiled earlier this week suggests the majority of job openings in the Northwest don’t pay enough to support a family.

Few economists dispute the findings.

That’s part of the reason Jobs Plus was created 11 years ago. In that time, the economic development organization has attracted 60 companies to Kootenai County, said Bob Potter, its president.

“I agree with the fact that in Idaho and Eastern Washington, we are well below the national average (for wages), and it is a problem,” Potter said.

Kootenai County’s average wage is $21,570 compared with $23,362 statewide. A year-end analysis of the companies Jobs Plus recruited shows they paid an average annual wage of $24,062 in 1998.

“I’m not necessarily proud of that, but that’s significantly higher than the average annual wage of a worker in Kootenai County,” Potter said. “We have turned down several companies because they did not meet our standards of wage rates.”

Recruitment of higher-paying jobs is a solution to the problem. But it’s not the only one.

“To get a livable wage, you have to have a good education,” said Mary Lou Reed, who was a member of the steering committee for the group developing the study. Reed stressed the need to educate young people looking at career options about the job situation. “Will they be able to advance? Should they become more qualified?”

Reed, a former state senator, also emphasized the need for action at the state level.

“How do we reach the policy makers and ask them to take this kind of information into consideration when they’re making policies that will impact growth of industry or of the economy?” Reed asked.

Potter said the state needs to do more to make sure it is attractive to companies.

“We’ve got to look at how we stack up with corporate income taxes, property taxes, incentives that make sense without giving away the store,” he said. “Our legislators need to make sure Idaho is competitive if we’re going to change this.”

The Northwest Job Gap Study, released Wednesday, says that a single person in Idaho with no children needs to make $9.22 per hour to make ends meet and a single adult with two children would need to make $14.42 per hour.

The study was conducted by the Northwest Policy Center at the University of Washington’s Graduate School of Public Affairs and the Northwest Federation of Community Organizations. It is the first attempt to document the job gap for families in Idaho, Washington, Montana and Oregon.

The study also suggests that there are many more people looking for work than there are jobs that pay living wages. For each job opening statewide, there are at least two job seekers.

Beverly Bishop is one of them.

The 55-year-old Coeur d’Alene resident lives alone and has been unemployed for six months. She’s been living off her savings but doesn’t know how much longer that money will last. She’s looking for a job in bookkeeping, a field in which she has experience. And she’s not picky.

“I would take anything,” Bishop said as she worked on her resume on a computer at the unemployment office. The job openings she’s seen lately are not encouraging.

“They want someone experienced but they’re not going to pay them anything,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have to take two part-time jobs.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: LOW WAGES The study found that in 1996, there were 330,000 working-age households in Idaho but fewer than 275,000 jobs paying $9.22 an hour or more and only 110,000 paying $14.42 or more.