Three years after graduating from college, Kevin Oatman is still suffering earnings shock.
"I was very surprised at the wages," said the 25-year-old Tampa resident. "I thought it was maybe me, but I called all my friends and even now . . . we're all working part-time jobs (in addition to full-time ones)."Oatman supplements the approximately $7 an hour (with commissions) he earns at the Ritz Camera shop in West Shore Mall with free-lance photography. He has worked three jobs to make ends meet.
He has no savings and he isn't optimistic about the future.
"My parents had a home, two cars, savings, when they were 30 and 40 years old. I just don't see that happening for me," he said.
He may be right.
Americans are working harder and earning less. Families are being forced to live on less income. The earning prospects for workers without college degrees are bleak, and even worse for those without high school diplomas.
Those are the findings delivered by a Washington, D.C., think tank.
"The central problem facing working Americans is the long-term erosion of their ability to obtain, or maintain, good jobs that sustain middle-class incomes," said Lawrence Mishel, co-author of the Economic Policy Institute's biannual report entitled "The State of Working America," in a statement accompanying the report.
According to Mishel and co-author Jared Bernstein, "real wages" have been declining for most American workers since 1979 and have continued to decline during the economic recovery of the past 31/2 years.
Real wages are earnings adjusted for inflation and expressed in today's dollars. That measurement enables researchers to compare earnings from one year to another in constant dollars. For example, non-management workers made $30.97 less per week in 1993 than in 1982 in adjusted dollars, even though their paychecks reflected more actual dollars in 1993.
Among the other findings in the 343-page report:
- For the first time, white-collar and college-educated men are experiencing the same erosion of wages that has plagued the three-fourths of the work force that doesn't have a college degree.
- Since 1979, the real wages of entry-level male and female high school graduates have fallen 30 percent and 18 percent, respectively. Over the same 15 years, the wages for entry-level college graduates fell 8 percent among men, but rose 4 percent among women.
- The minimum wage, which has failed to keep pace with inflation, has declined in value by nearly 25 percent. A minimum-wage worker in 1979 earned the equivalent of $5.66 in today's dollars, compared to today's worker, who earns $4.25.
- The median family income, which increased slightly from 1992 to 1993, is stil $1,500 below 1989 levels and probably will not reach its 1989 level until 1995.
Authors Mishel and Bernstein say the widespread erosion of wages has meant a continuing growth in the proportion of the work force earning less than poverty-level wages and a shrinkage of workers, especially men, who earn midlevel wages. Only the richest got richer.
"There is no more middle class," said Tom Murphy of St. Petersburg, co-owner of The Rolling Pin store in West Shore Mall. "You can't make it as a man unless you're a professional."
But even that group is sliding backward on the earnings scale, according to the study.
In the early 1990s, white-collar and college-educated men saw their wages fall by about 4 percent, although that's not nearly the rate of decline experienced by less-educated workers.
The wages of high school graduates or blue-collar workers - who lost the most in the 1980s - fell nearly 6 percent from 1989 to 1993.
The average male high school graduate earns 17 percent less in 1993 than in 1979.
The only educational groups seemingly exempt from falling real wages in the early 1990s have been women with college or professional degrees.