Wages rose for many Fresno County jobs last decade. But did they outrun inflation?
Wages in Fresno County rose during the 2010s for most – but not all – occupations. But overall, compensation for most workers failed to keep pace with the rising cost of living over the course of the decade.
The median wage for all occupations in the county – the midpoint at which half of workers earned more and half earned less – was estimated at $16.91 per hour last year, according to the state Employment Development Department’s 2019 Occupational Employment Statistics Survey of more than 550 individual occupational titles identified in the county. That’s about $2.35 more, or an increase of just over 16%, compared to the median wage in 2010.
California’s minimum wage in 2010 was $8 per hour. In 2019, it was $11 per hour for companies with 25 or fewer employees, and $12 for employers with more than 25 workers.
Over the same 10 years, however, the Consumer Price Index for the western U.S., which measures the prices that people pay for things, climbed by more than 22% – about six percentage points faster than the growth in median wages.
What’s more, the median wage actually slid lower for more than 60 occupations in Fresno County, falling by as little as 1% or less for some jobs to as much as 30% or more for others. Depending on the job, those declines represent real-money slippage in pay of less than a dollar per hour to more than $14 per hour.
Collectively, the figures indicate that:
▪ More than half of the workers in the county – both in public and private employment – are concentrated in jobs that pay less than $17 per hour; and
▪ Workers at that midrange of the county’s overall wage distribution actually lost ground to inflation despite continued economic growth since the 2007-09 recession and a much-improved employment situation.
Not surprisingly, medical doctors were the highest paid occupation in Fresno County in 2019. General internists, psychiatrists and family and general practitioners topped the list for which details were available, with median wages of more than $90 per hour. In the overall scheme of things, however, such high-paying medical gigs number only in the hundreds and represent a minute share of jobs in the county compared to the tens of thousands of jobs at the lower end of the wage spectrum.
Nearly 103,000 people worked in 2019 in occupations in which the median wage was less than $13 per hour. That includes:
▪ More than 25,000 farm workers and laborers;
▪ Almost 17,000 personal care aides;
▪ More than 12,000 fast-food cooks, prep workers and servers;
▪ About 9,500 retail salespeople;
▪ More than 4,200 restaurant waiters and waitresses.
Statewide, the median wage among more than 15.2 million people in California’s workforce was $18.12 in 2010. In 2019, there were just over 17 million workers, with a median hourly wage of $20.86 –an increase of 15.1%, slightly lower than Fresno County’s growth, and also slower than the increase in the Consumer Price Index reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Keeping up with the cost of living
In relation to the Consumer Price Index, which rose by 22.2% over the decade, almost 240 individual occupations in Fresno County saw the median wage lose ground – which means wages for at least half of the jobs in those occupations did not go up fast enough to keep up with inflation.
They include some good-paying management jobs such as general and operations managers, for which the median wage rose by less than 1% during the decade, from $43.19 per hour in 2010 to $43.60 per hour in 2019. Human resources managers saw the median wage climb just 1.8% between 2010 and 2019, rising to about $49.60 per hour last year.
Among occupations in which the median wage went down, not up, over the decade, were arts/design/sports and media occupations such as producers and directors; reporters and correspondents; photographers; graphic designers; and TV, video and motion picture camera operators. Those declines are not necessarily because individual workers were being paid less last year than in 2010, but can be at least partially attributed to more-experienced and higher-paid workers retiring or leaving their jobs and being replaced by younger or newer hires at lower rates of pay.
The median wage for reporters and correspondents, for example, was $24.76 per hour in 2010; by 2019, that was down almost 23% or $5.64 to a rate of $19.12 per hour. TV and video camera operators saw the median wage drop from $23.80 per hour to $15.98 – a decline of almost 33% or 6.86 per hour.
While the Consumer Price Index measures the cost of things, other necessities of living also rose in Fresno County by substantially more than the rate of growth in median wages. Data from online real-estate firm Zillow.com indicates that apartment rents in Fresno climbed by almost 41% during the decade, even though the city remains one of the least-expensive big cities to rent in California.
At the beginning of the decade, the median selling prices of homes in the Fresno County market was less than $149,000, according to Zillow. By the end of last year, the median price was just under $270,000 – an increase of more than 81%.
Unemployment rates
When the decade began, Fresno County’s unemployment rate was near 18%, the result of massive job losses in an economic recession that began in 2007. The rate peaked at 18.4% in February 2010, and the number of people officially counted as out of work was estimated at 80,000.
Those estimates didn’t include people who had given up looking for work and effectively dropped out of the available workforce.
By late 2019, the official unemployment rate had fallen to levels not seen in decades, dropping to under 7%, and the number of out-of-work people was fewer than 30,000.
This story was originally published January 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
