Atlanta wages, like jobs, continue to suffer

By Dan Chapman

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The recession, as everybody knows, wiped out tens of thousands of metro Atlanta jobs.

Yet even those Atlantans who kept  their jobs saw their wages depressed more than job-holders in virtually every major American city.

According to the PayScale Index, an online survey of pay data released Tuesday, only Detroit suffered slower wage growth since 2006. And, although the recession officially ended in mid-2009, Atlanta wages overall have dropped 0.8 percent the last year.

“It’s supply and demand,” Al Lee, director of quantitative analysis for the Seattle-based index, said Monday. “Clearly, if unemployment is high and demand for workers is down, at some point that will be reflected in the wages of people who do have jobs. Because there is nowhere else for them to go.”

Put another way, U.S. corporations flush with $2 trillion in cash aren’t hiring and see no competitive need to raise salaries. Metro Atlanta’s jobless rate stood at 10.3 percent in November as legions of the unemployed struggled to find work.

The PayScale Index (www.payscale.com) tracks compensation across a swath of private U.S. industries and metropolitan areas. Like the Consumer Price Index, PayScale gauges the cost of workers on a quarterly scale. Combined, the two indexes show the eroded buying power of the American worker.

Wages grew 5.4 percent nationwide before the recession kicked into high gear in 2008. By the end of 2010, wages were no higher than they were in early 2008, according to the index. Inflation, though, had inched up, slicing into workers’ disposable income and savings.

Working Atlantans took it on the chin. Since 2006, workers across the region have seen only a 2.1 percent uptick in salaries. Only Detroit, with a 1.8 percent increase, fared worse among the nation’s top 20 metropolitan areas.

“No rebound is in sight,” the report stated.

Lee  said the construction and hsopitality sectors remained very weak through the recession.“ “Both are struggling to come back, wage-wise,” he said.

More than one in five construction workers nationwide remain unemployed, according to the Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC).