Low-wage work tends to fall in a handful of sectors that together account for most NH jobs. Taking a bird’s eye view, 41 percent of the state’s labor force works in service, sales and office assistance occupations, and 20 percent works in traditional blue-collar jobs like production, transportation, manufacturing, construction and maintenance, according to ACS. The remaining 39 percent of NH’s labor force works in traditional white-collar professions like management, business, science, the arts and education.
The spread in median wages across occupations is considerable. According to the latest available labor market statistics released by the State of NH for June 2013, service-sector occupations like food preparation and serving and personal care and service are at the bottom of the list with median wages around $10 per hour. Next come building, maintenance, sales, health care support, transportation, office and production occupations with median hourly rates from $12 to $16. Together, these occupations account for 60 percent of NH’s workforce.
Traditional middle-class jobs like social and protective services; construction and extraction; maintenance and installation; and education, arts, entertainment and media come next with median wages between $18 and $22 per hour. When combined with lower-wage occupations, fully 78 percent of NH jobs earn less than $22 per hour. Roughly half of these jobs—and 62 percent of jobs statewide—required postsecondary education in 2008, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. For a typical family of four with two parents working the equivalent of one full-time job at 35 hours per week year-round and providing childcare, wages must exceed $24 per hour or $43,000 per year just to meet basic needs, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. However, less than one-third of the 22 occupations and 22 percent of the available jobs analyzed fit the bill. For the 43 percent of NH working families led by a single mother, the basic needs threshold for a family with two children is significantly higher due to childcare costs. A single mother working full-time year-round would need to earn $32 per hour ($57,000 per year) to meet the family’s needs, according to the Living Wage Calculator. A mother earning minimum wage would have to work an impossible 151 hours per week year-round–the equivalent of four full-time jobs–to meet that threshold. For such families, government subsidies in the form of earned income tax credits, childcare credits, housing subsidies and supplemental nutrition assistance (food stamps) are indispensable.
Unfortunately, whether a single- or two-parent family, most low-wage workers cannot count on full-time year-round work with the medical and other benefits it once conferred. Although NH’s seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate saw a healthy decline during the past 12 months to 4.5 percent in March 2014 (the seventh lowest in the nation), 11 percent of workers were either unemployed, marginally attached to the labor force, or employed part-time for economic reasons in 2013 (a 30 percent jump since 2008), according to the Census Bureau’s alternative measures of labor underutilization. Meanwhile, a growing number of the unemployed have given up hope of finding another job and are exiting the labor force altogether.
Daniel Weeks works on education, poverty and political reform in Manchester and is a fellow with the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, where he is writing a book on poverty and democracy in the United States. He can be reached at Daniel@PoorInDemocracy.org.
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