
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 4, 1994                   TAG: 9409070039
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Medium

WAGES FALLING DESPITE RECOVERY, STUDY FINDS

Most American workers, including professionals with college degrees, have yet to see increases in their paychecks despite the improving economy, according to a study released Saturday.

Declining wages, even among better-educated workers, and a growing income disparity between those with and without college degrees, are becoming fixtures of the 1990s and the economic recovery, said the study by the Economic Policy Institute, an organization partially funded by labor groups.

``On the one hand, we're overcoming a lot of our short-term cyclical problems. We're getting good job growth and unemployment is falling,'' said Lawrence Mishel, an economist who coauthored the study. ``Now we're down to the fundamental long-term problems that were present in the economy in the 1980s.

``We're talking about the middle-class squeeze. We're talking about wages falling for a wide majority of workers,'' he said.

Mishel, director of research an EPI, said it was ``no longer the case even that college grads are doing better than high school graduates'' in terms of increasing their incomes faster than the rate of inflation. And there are ``a lot of employment and wage problems among white-collar men,'' he said.

The study, titled ``The State of Working America, 1994-95,'' says that from 1989 to 1993, median ``real'' wages, after adjustment for inflation, have fallen 2.6 percent overall and 4.6 percent among men. During the same period, wages for entry-level workers with high school diplomas fell 7.8 percent while earnings for new workers with college degrees dropped 6.1 percent.

Mishel said inflation-adjusted wages for college-educated men have fallen every year since 1987.

The study said also that new problems have emerged as well. For instance, it said the wages of male college-educated workers fell as fast as those of men with high school diplomas, nearly 5 percent from 1989-93.

by CNB