The Labor Department said Friday that the US added 175,000 jobs last month (though the national unemployment rate ticked up to 6.7 percent), but New York is in a slow economic meltdown, analysts say.
The city and state face a future of low-wage job growth, killer taxes and regulations — and a hostile business climate forcing firms out.
One in 10 workers in New York City — 400,000 in all — are now in low-wage jobs, with 37 percent of all wage earners paid less than $15 an hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Eight of the 10 occupations reckoned to add the most net jobs in the Big Apple over the next 10 years have median annual wages of below $30,000, according to another analysis.
In principle, there’s nothing generally wrong with a low-wage job, critics say. Rather, it’s the growing gap in numbers between the Big Apple’s once-plentiful middle-class jobs and lower-wage jobs that worries experts.
The extent of this disparity was revealed at a recent City Council hearing. In his testimony, James Parrott, chief economist at the Fiscal Policy Institute, showed how by the end of last year, New York City’s share of low-wage jobs shot up from 25 percent of the total job market to 31 percent.
“That’s a pretty pronounced change,” Parrott told The Post. Meanwhile, jobs in the high-wage sector shrank from 34.7 percent to 32.2 percent, and went from 40.6 percent to 36.6 percent in the medium-wage sector.
Despite the gains in net new jobs since about 2008 — up about 6 percent in New York City — this seemingly good news suggests, counterintuitively, a depressing downside. The Big Apple is at the epicenter of the nation’s low-wage job-growth machine in fast-food services, retail, hospitality, tourism and other sectors.
“That’s my sense,” said Parrott, “simply because there has been more net new job growth in New York City.”
New York City food-service jobs paid $24,985 on average in 2012, excluding benefits. Middle-wage jobs in construction paid just over $71,000. High-wage jobs in finance and insurance paid about $267,000.
Now some of the best-paying jobs are fleeing. “The whole concept of doing business in New York is a very expensive proposition for us,” said Stephen Sheinbaum, CEO of Merchant Cash and Capital, a Midtown lender to small businesses that employs about 115 people. “One of our competitors moved all their underwriting out of New York to Virginia; another moved offices to the suburbs of Baltimore, where the cost of living is less,” he added.