Competition fierce for good jobs, study finds

BOISE – Amber Walsworth was back at it again on Thursday, scanning the computer at the Boise Job Service Office for clerical openings.

The 25-year-old single woman has been looking for some kind of clerical job for the past three months since she moved to Boise from Mountain Home.

“It’s tough,” she said. Even though the jobs pay as little as $7 an hour, “the competition is really high.”

A regional analysis released Thursday confirmed what Walsworth and others looking for work already knew – the demand is intense for jobs that pay what the Northwest Federation of Community Organizations calls a living wage.

Based on 2002 costs, that would be $9.22 an hour in Boise for a single person like Walsworth – a little less in other areas of the state. Nearly seven of every 10 job openings around the state meet or beat that.

But for a single parent with two children, the living wage averages $18.82 an hour across the state and only one of every five jobs openings offers that kind of paycheck, according to the federation’s analysis.

It defines a living wage as enough to pay for basic necessities, cover taxes and other obligations, save a little for emergencies and remain off public assistance.

Of the more than 430,000 working-age households identified by the Census Bureau in Idaho, 9 percent were single parents and 15 percent were single adults. The average annual wage was just over $14.30 an hour. The minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.

The analysis underscored economists’ concerns in recent months that the 19,000 jobs the state has picked up in the past year do not offer the kind of wages that were paid to the thousands of high-technology workers who lost their jobs during the recession.

“There’s quite a few jobs out there – under $10 an hour,” said one job seeker in the Job Service Office who declined to give his name. He has been looking for work in a warehouse for two months.

Since 2000, before the economy went into its slump, the state has lost 10,000 relatively high-paying goods-producing jobs and replaced them with 33,000 typically lower-paying service and retail sector jobs.

The federation analysis determined that for every job opening promising a wage high enough to make life livable for a single parent of two, there are 10 people trying to get it. That is up from eight people seeking each similar opening in the late 1990s.

“There are just so few jobs out there that pay enough for me to support my family,” said Kris Elston, a single mother with two boys, 3 and 3 months. “We’re living with some very tough decisions.”

Lee Flinn of the Idaho Women’s Network said the state has made some strides in fostering livable wage jobs, citing this year’s enactment of a $1,000 tax credit per job for every job an employer creates that pays at least $15.50 an hour and includes health care.

Dwight Johnson of the state Commerce and Labor Department said it was still too early to determine if the law has had any real impact. Analysts expected only about 300 jobs to be created this year in that pay range.

Flinn also cited the need for the state to support its school system, which is critical to having a well-trained labor pool.

The state cannot overlook its social responsibility to continue helping those who have not been able to find jobs that get them off public assistance, she said.

But social economist Charles Skoro at Boise State University said there still is too much unknown about the economics of job creation to know what helps and what doesn’t.

The credit, Skoro said, “probably is OK, but we need to understand a lot more about how good jobs are generated. I don’t want to ridicule anybody who is trying to do something good, but I don’t think we know enough yet.”