Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 17, 1994 TAG: 9403180057
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Fortunately, as reported in this newspaper's "Peril and Promise" installment last Sunday, the employment market's service sector does not consist exclusively of hamburger-flipping and its low-pay like. Growth in local service jobs also includes moderate- to high-wage employment in industries like computers and health care.
This helps to explain, in part, why our region's average wages have fared well over the past five years, compared with the nation as a whole. The news is worth celebrating.
Except when you consider that the nation as a whole fared poorly. In after-inflation dollars, the average 1993 weekly wage in the United States was less than in 1989. Inflation-adjusted wages were down in the Roanoke and New River valleys, too, if not by quite as much as nationwide.
And except when you consider that our region remains less than adequately prepared for labor-market trends already in evidence and likely to accelerate in the future.
Find, as you like, grounds for encouragement or concern in the mixed news about wages. You have to worry about public attitudes that lag behind economic reality.
Consider: Though total number of jobs in the Roanoke-New River region rose slightly from 1989 to 1993, the number of manufacturing jobs continued to decline, by nearly 10 percent. The decline occurred, moreover, in a region less buffeted than many by the winds of recession during the early '90s.
Most signs suggest that the drop in manufacturing employment reflects fundamental shifts in the economy - rising productivity and global competition among them - rather than a one-time-only event or a phenomenon of the business cycle.
Yet the region's unrequited love affair with manufacturing apparently continues. In a public-opinion poll conducted last fall for this newspaper, Roanoke Valley residents put attracting new manufacturing jobs at the top of their list for economic-development strategies.
The infatuation is understandable. Historically, and as many Roanokers know from personal experience, such jobs have paid well on the whole. They've supported middle-class aspirations for workers who lack advanced education or skills.
But in this era of automation and international markets, manufacturing could prove an unreliable helpmate for jobs growth. Even the line between manufacturing and services is blurring, as high-tech producers adjust their offerings to individual customer needs, just as service-providers do.
In the future, most routine production will go abroad or pay low wages. Manufacturing that does remain will tend to require higher skills and fewer workers. Trying to attract jobs in the upper end of service employment may offer more security for our region.
Attracting jobs of any kind is, however, more a goal than a strategy. And any strategy to attain the goal of more jobs in the moderate-to-high-wage portions of the service sector has to have education at its core.
Our region's good looks can attract money-spending admirers. But to keep them, we'll need brains more than brawn. That's why closer ties to Virginia Tech, listed dead last in the Roanoke Valley poll, is in fact the kind of strategy necessary for reaching the goal of more desirable employment.
Necessary, too, is the kind of flexible, skilled work force able to adapt to the demands of good-wage service-sector jobs. In traditional manufacturing, a high-school diploma or less was often sufficient for well-paying jobs. To grow the high-pay employment of the future, that won't be enough - not for job seekers, not for their communities.
by CNB