Unequal employment

State needs to replace lost jobs

Connecticut boasted the nation’s highest per capita income in 2017, at $70,121.

From 2009 to 2015, the income of the top 1 percent in Connecticut grew by 22.9 percent while incomes for everybody else dropped by 1.8 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The institute ranks Connecticut the third most unequal state in the country, behind New York and Florida, in its most recent study.

Economist Mark Price, who worked on the Economic Policy Institute inequality study, said financial industry hubs in Connecticut and New York exacerbate inequality in those states, but he noted that disparities are present throughout the U.S. economy.

Unemployment numbers are improving nationwide and since 2015, Price said, there has been “broader and healthier growth” that is more widespread. “But that doesn’t reverse the overall 36-year trends where a tiny fraction of the folks at the top capture a significant share of income growth.”

Inequality is especially stark in Connecticut’s cities, according to a Center for Public Integrity data analysis.

The Center used 2016 Census data to measure the ratio between two benchmarks: the lowest combined income a household could earn while still breaking into the top 5 percent of household income and the highest combined income a household could earn while still falling in the bottom 20 percent.

The analysis showed the Bridgeport-StamfordNorwalk metro area in Fairfield County to be the most unequal in the country, where households in the top 5 percent of income took home 14 times more than those in the bottom 20 percent.

The nearby New YorkNewark-Jersey City metro area is close behind, as households in the top 5 percent there earn 11 times more than the bottom 20 percent.

Other metro areas cities among the top 10 most unequal as measured by the Center: San FranciscoOakland-Hayward, where the top 5 percent earn 10.9 times more than the bottom 20, Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach (10.4 times more) and Houston-Sugarland metro area (10.24 times more).

In Connecticut, the New Haven-Milford metro area and the Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford metro area also rank high on the inequality scale.

The findings don’t surprise The Rev. Bonita Grubbs, the executive director of Christian Community Action, a nonprofit that provides emergency housing and other support for needy families in New Haven.

“The optimistic way is to think the rising tide lifts all boats. The reality is the boat has a hole in it and there are some individuals who are not in that boat,” Grubbs said.

Unemployment is currently trending downward in Connecticut, just as it is nationwide, and some defense contractors like Electric Boat Shipyard in Groton and engine builder Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford are adding slots.

But about half of the jobs created since the end of the recession are lowskilled, low-wage jobs in the retail and service sector.

Many don’t come with benefits or stability or enough pay to live comfortably in a place that isn’t as pricey as New York City, yet has a higher cost of living than many other regions.

And some of the best jobs are gone for good.

“In Connecticut, financial services has been a major, major part of our economy,” said Joe Brennan, CEO of the Connecticut Business and Industry Association. “It got hit very hard (by the recession). Those jobs went away and they’re not coming back.”

Employment in Connecticut’s financial services sector has shrunk by about 11 percent since the Great Recession —about 17,000 jobs.

The Connecticut Business and Industry Association estimates there are 13,600 jobs open in the state in advanced manufacturing, but these positions require specialized training that Connecticut hasn’t done a good job bestowing on its residents.

These were the quandaries that were facing Michael Hankins, 43, at a recent job fair at the Margaret E. Morton Government Center in Bridgeport.

Finding a job is hard enough, Hankins said, “but they don’t want to pay you what you’re worth.” Hankins served 18 years in the Army and “even that doesn’t help” find a job that pays more than $10 or $11 an hour, he said, hardly enough to pay for a decent one-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport.

Hankins recently returned to Connecticut from Texas, where he earned an HVAC accreditation that doesn’t help find employment in Connecticut.

Hankins left Connecticut in 2017 to receive technical training at a school in Texas that advertised to veterans. The school, Retail Ready Career Training, shut down after the federal Department of Veterans Affairs investigated it for fraud.

Hankins earned an HVAC license but upon moving back to Connecticut found the credentials aren’t accepted here.

Fairfield County, where Bridgeport sits, is “supposedly the richest county in the country,” Hankins said, “but I don’t see it.”

People are feeling the squeeze even in superaffluent Greenwich.

“We have tremendous wealth, but it's also a tale of two cities. There’s a growing number of low income people,” said Alan Barry, commissioner of social services in Greenwich.

Due to the outsized cost of living in Greenwich, Barry’s department uses 200 percent of the federal poverty level to determine who is eligible for services like public housing.

“To use the federal poverty level (to set benefit eligibility) is totally ridiculous. It’s outdated, antiquated and it's just not useful,” Barry said. “There’s no consideration that this is Greenwich, this is Connecticut, this is the Northeast. The cost of living is way different here.”

Barry says a more useful metric for economic stress is the United Way’s ALICE budget, which stands for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, and in Fairfield County amounts to 300 percent of the federal poverty level.

Barry said that while Greenwich has 1,214 households living at the federal poverty level, it has 4,549 households living at or below the ALICE threshold, or about 20 percent of Greenwich’s population of 62,359.