L.A. loses high-paying jobs, adds ones with lower wages
Los Angeles County has recovered the jobs it lost during the recession. But a new report says the region’s job base has shifted over the last 10 years, losing tens of thousands of higher-paying manufacturing and finance jobs and gaining lower-paying service jobs.
The report, released Wednesday by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., says that since 2007, L.A. County has lost 89,000 manufacturing jobs, which had an average wage of $70,100 in 2016.
L.A. County had a total of almost 4.4 million jobs last year, a rise of 2.1% compared with 2015, the report said.
During the same 10-year period, 35,000 jobs were lost in finance, accounting, architecture and engineering in the area. Those jobs paid an average wage of $85,000 in 2007, according to the LAEDC. The organization did not have 2016 wage comparisons for some of those jobs.
Meanwhile, the county added 92,000 jobs in food service and 49,000 jobs in inhome support services.
The average wage for food service jobs last year was $20,000, while the average wage for in-home support service workers was $14,000, the report said.
“Overall, we’ve recovered all of the jobs lost,” said Christine Cooper, senior vice president of the LAEDC. “It’s just a matter of what the distribution of those jobs looks like.”
Chris Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics, who was not involved in the report, said many of the jobs the region lost were in lower-paying manufacturing industries such as apparel. Thornberg said that lumping various factory jobs into one average does not make a fair comparison.
U.S. manufacturing jobs have steadily fallen over the years as automation cut the number of people needed on assembly lines and the industry employed more highly educated workers.
In L.A. County, manufacturing jobs declined for the third year in 2016, by 6,000. The LAEDC predicted that the county would lose an additional 1,420 manufacturing jobs through 2018.
“The fact that those people have gone from, say, working at American Apparel to perhaps working at a hotel or at a restaurant, candidly, nothing has changed for them,” Thornberg said.
He cautioned against reading too much into the job-change numbers, pointing to other economic measurements, such as L.A. County’s declining unemployment rate. In 2016, the county’s average jobless rate was 5.1%, compared with a statewide rate of 5.4%. Both were the lowest in nine years.
“Within the context of a relatively soft recovery, L.A. is looking fine,” Thornberg said.
L.A. County’s per-capita income is projected to be $48,790 in 2016, up 9% from $44,922 in 2013, according to the LAEDC. These income figures are 2009 dollars adjusted for inflation.