THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 9, 1996 TAG: 9603080003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 47 lines
It's a sign of the times that Virginia's largest private employer will soon be Food Lion supermarkets. Newport News Shipbuilding, the state's largest employer for decades, will drop to second.
The 110-year-old shipyard, which has helped keep the U.S. Navy afloat for many years, employed more than 30,000 workers during the salad days of defense spending in the 1980s. Now the shipyard's workers number 18,061, and the work force is expected to shrink further, to between 16,000 and 16,500 by year's end.
Erosion of the work force at the shipyard is primarily due to defense-spending cuts in recent years.
Food Lion, on the other hand, is in the midst of a supermarket boom in Virginia. The North Carolina-based chain already has 234 stores in the state (21 in Virginia Beach) and another six on the drawing board. Food Lion employs 17,812 full- and part-time Virginia workers. The chain's growth reflects a national trend toward service-oriented jobs and away from manufacturing ones.
There is nothing inherently bad about grocery-store jobs vs. shipbuilding jobs - except when you consider the wage differential. The average hourly wage of a Newport News Shipbuilding worker is $13.70 while Food Lion's average hourly wage is $7.64.
That's not happy news for Hampton Roads. The disappearance of well-paying jobs harms every aspect of the local economy from real-estate values to spending by consumers on big-ticket purchases and entertainment.
To its credit, Newport News Shipbuilding is weaning itself from dependence on naval contracts and is competing successfully for commercial shipbuilding contracts. Last month the shipyard struck a deal to build five double-hulled petroleum-product tankers.
We wish it the shipyard well as it begins building more commercial vessels.
The economic health of Hampton Roads depends in part on the growth of service-sector jobs, such as those at Food Lion, but it looks to high-wage, high-skill manufacturing jobs, such as those at Newport News Shipbuilding, for economic strength. by CNB