Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 2, 1994 TAG: 9312290259
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF DeBELL STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Work behind a perfume counter at the mall?
Maybe wear a uniform and hustle burgers somewhere?
Go ahead. The jobs are there.
But don't start shopping for that Lexus just yet. The pay in retail sales tends to be modest, to put it politely.
"Sales, retail" is at the top of the list of jobs with the most openings\ in Virginia. In its job projections for 1988-2000, the Virginia Employment\ Commission says there will be more than 70,000 openings in the field across\ the state.
About 2,400 of them will be in the Roanoke Valley, where retail sales also\ tops the VEC list of jobs with the most openings.
Getting one should be fairly easy, but getting rich from it would be tough. The wage was $232 a week as of the first quarter of 1993 - lowest of any of the\ industries classified by the VEC.
It compared with $511 for manufacturing jobs, $707 for federal government jobs, $380 in construction, $496 in wholesale trade and $498 in health care.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' list of the country's 50 lowest-paying\ occupations includes at least six sales jobs. Shoe sales made the top 10, and\ apparel sales was No. 23.
Not all of retail sales people are underpaid, of course. With experience\ (and commissions), many of them can make good livings. Retail sales is an\ ancient and respectable calling.
But it's also a symbol of what's happening to the American economy. Retail\ sales exemplifies the trend away from goods-producing jobs and toward\ service-producing jobs.
Some of the better-paying service jobs, the ones that require more\ education and training, are growing as a percentage of the economy. Others,\ like many of those in retail sales, tend to pay lower wages, provide only\ part-time employment and be deficient in benefits.
Those are the most plentiful service jobs. And there is a clear statistical\ link between them and the lower end of the education chain. In general, less\ education and training means less income.
Not that service jobs don't have their place, as VEC economist William\ Mezger points out.
"Service is useful to the economy for entry-level jobs and for money and\ experience for students," he said. "The retails are a good example. A lot of\ them probably could hardly operate without the students."
And many of the students hardly could operate without sales jobs to pay for books and gas and Dockers and caps to wear backward.
Nearly 60 percent of the upcoming openings in Virginia retail sales jobs will be caused by what the VEC calls "separations" - people leaving the labor market to, say, go back to school.
Plain old turnover is common in low-paying and entry-level jobs, too, as people move around in search of better pay.
"In a lot of retail occupations, the job has to be filled three or four times a year," Mezger said.
Doris Brown knows it all too well. The personnel manager for Heironimus department stores says it can be tough to keep her sales staff filled.
It's not a shortage of new applicants, she said. "It's high turnover."
Same thing at Salem's Maid Bess Corp., where high turnover leaves a continuous demand for sewing machine operators.
"We can't fill our needs," personnel director Linda Hodges said. She hires lots of minority workers, including 50 Vietnamese, and has found foreign workers to be no less eager than Americans to leave low-level production work behind at the first opportunity.
Though low wages are fairly typical of service-sector jobs, they are far from universal. At its broadest level, services includes everything from janitors and orderlies to doctors and lawyers and computer analysts. Clearly, it encompasses plenty of respectably paying occupations.
Not many of those jobs are near the top of the list of Virginia occupations with the most openings. Of the top 10, only registered nurses, general managers/top executives and computer systems analysts would come close.
Other jobs among those with the most projected openings include waiters and waitresses, janitors and cleaners, secretaries, general office clerks - and retail sales.
Many of the same jobs show up on the list of occupations with the most openings in the Roanoke Metropolitan Statistical Area, or MSA.
The fastest-growing jobs, as opposed to those with the most openings, "will be in the . . . fields requiring the highest education and skill levels," said the Hudson Institute's landmark study, "Workforce 2000." "Between now and the year 2000, for the first time in history, a majority of all new jobs will require postsecondary education."
Ann Ward, district manager for Manpower Temporary Services, has this simple advice for people entering the job market:
"Get every piece of training, every piece of experience with computers that you can. There's hardly any job anymore in which people don't operate computers. . . . There's hardly any such thing anymore as a receptionist who sits there and answers the phone and greets people."
There is more and more use of temporary employees for work that used to be done in-house, say Ward and her counterparts at other agencies. And the days are long gone when typing and shorthand skills were enough.
"Now the norm in a sophisticated office would be a PC with some word-processing program that the temporary employee would have to be proficient on," said Pauli Piotrowski of Kelly Temporary Services.
The VEC does not do projections for individual counties and cities. However, VEC spokesmen say statewide projections are generally applicable to all localities with allowances for local conditions. For example, Mezger said, the relative prominence of retail sales jobs in the Roanoke MSA is an outgrowth of the valley's role as a regional shopping destination and center for telemarketing businesses, Mezger said.
All of the high-opening and high-growth jobs in the state are part of the service-providing sector, which far surpasses the goods-producing sector as a provider of jobs. Within the broad service-providing sector, the retail trade and services divisions will account for more than 70 percent of the state's employment growth between 1988 and 2000.
The VEC says retail trade, which includes fast-food employees, will benefit from the increase in two-income families that like to eat out or buy prepared meals. The services division will be driven by health care for the state's growing elderly population and business services for firms that contract for support work formerly provided in-house - advertising, data processing, building maintenance and the like.
This is a trend that Ann Ward of Manpower Temporary Services in Roanoke has seen first-hand.
"We become almost a second human resources department" for some clients, she said.
In keeping with a long-established trend, jobs in the goods-providing sector will increase numerically but decrease as a percentage of the economy. The VEC says construction will account for almost all of the state's growth in the goods-producing sector by 2000.
It's true not only at the state level but in the Roanoke and New River Valley region, as demonstrated by figures from the state employment commission. In 1970, they show, manufacturing accounted for 28.6 percent of employment in the region. By 1990, manufacturing's share had dropped to 22.8 percent.
At the same time, service jobs increased in number and by 1992 were approaching numerical parity with manufacturing.
Included in the region are the counties of Bedford, Botetourt, Craig, Floyd, Franklin, Giles, Montgomery, Pulaski and Roanoke, and the cities of Bedford, Radford, Roanoke and Salem.
Production jobs typically pay better than service, but they are disappearing by the thousands nationwide as companies act to cut costs in the name of greater productivity and competitiveness in the global marketplace.
Automation is taking some of the jobs. Others are simply being moved from the United States to countries where people will toil for a fraction of the wages and benefits demanded by U.S. factory workers.
Service occupations will be the state's fastest-growing occupational category. (These are actual jobs, as distinguished from the broad service "sector.")
The second-fastest growing category is what the VEC calls "professional, paraprofessional and technical" occupations. The demand for health-care professionals such as registered nurses will be one factor here. Another will be automation, which will increase the demand for computer systems analysts.
Jobs in this category pay better and require more education and/or training. In that way, they seem to bear out predictions that the future will belong to what Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls "symbolic analysts": those whose deal in numbers, words or other symbols - as opposed to those who make things - and whose jobs require greater education and training.
"National data indicate that those occupational categories which are expected to grow the fastest are also the categories with the greatest percentage of workers with at least one year of college," states the summary of "Virginia's Workforce 2000," a report prepared by the VEC in 1991.
"Conversely, the slowest growing occupational categories are also the ones with the smallest percentage of workers with at least one year of college."
by CNB