Number of top-paying positions lag behind neighboring states
As a four-term mayor of Stamford, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy took the governor’s office having a familiarity with transportation, education and combatting crime, issues that he has attempted to make hallmarks of his two terms as governor.
As for Ned Lamont and Bob Stefanowski, the two candidates who would replace him? They have made making money the cornerstones of their careers to date — with the first years of the winner’s gubernatorial career hinging in part on getting Connecticut’s economy to take flight on the wings of the best-paying jobs the state can attract.
Economists have attributed Connecticut’s comparative malaise to an inability to rekindle meaningful growth in high-paying professions such as management and finance that generate income taxes and other state revenue, and there is evidence in the
waning months of the Malloy administration to support that thesis heading into the fall elections.
As of mid-August, the career website Indeed.com listed about 1,300 open jobs in Connecticut offering $100,000 or more, a threshold that 23 percent of earners in the state achieved as of 2015 as calculated by the Internal Revenue Service.
Those $100,000 opportunities amounted to just 3.6 percent of the nearly 36,000 Connecticut total job openings posted on Indeed, however, a rate trailing that of the state’s Northeast economic rivals of New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts.
While not all companies list compensation estimates for the jobs they post — including Norwalk-based Booking Holdings, which is currently seeking a director of executive compensation,
salary terms unspecified — Indeed is a useful barometer along with other job sites like CareerBuilder and Glassdoor.
Connecticut also had a smaller percentage of $100,000 openings as a ratio to the number of jobs at that floor in 2015, at 0.3 percent. By comparison, Massachusetts and New York had more than double that rate, and New Jersey ahead by a smaller margin.
In August, UBS is listed on Indeed.com among the employers with the 10 largest numbers of $100,000 jobs in both New York and New Jersey. The Switzerland-based investment bank has scaled back dramatically its Stamford base of operations in the past decade along with Royal Bank of Scotland, with Stamford’s cluster of commodities trading firms seeing significant cuts including Glencore, which exited its downtown offices last
year in favor of New York City.
“Connecticut’s days of being a place where sixfigure incomes are as abundant as, say, in 2006, are over,” said David Lewis, CEO of the Norwalk-based human resources consultancy OperationsInc. “There is no evidence — none — of a return of businesses to this region that pay the way financial services jobs had been paying.”
The Stamford-based information-technology prognosticator Gartner now leads southwestern Connecticut with about two dozen openings on Indeed.com offering annual income of at least $100,000, with fewer opportunities listed at Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford; Boehringer Ingelheim in Ridgefield; and Henkel and Synchrony Financial in Stamford.
And other companies are in growth mode in Connecticut, to include the world’s second biggest hedge fund AQR Capital Management,
which is in the process of adding hundreds of jobs in Greenwich with financial assistance from the state.
The average hedge fund portfolio manager makes $1 million annually including varying compensation like commissions and bonuses, according to projections published in November 2017 by Institutional Investor based on surveys of some
800 professionals in the hedge fund sector, with research analyst pay averaging more than $700,000.
A separate Grant Thornton survey last year, meanwhile, pegged the average salaries of senior corporate financial executives between $130,000 and
$350,000. Stefanowski is a former executive of both General Electric and UBS, with Lamont having run a cable TV company focused on university campuses, and his wife, Annie Lamont, is a
senior executive in the Norwalk office of the private equity investment firm Oak HC/FT. Both candidates have as good a window into what corporations are looking for as any to make it to the cusp of statewide office.
On his campaign website, Lamont touts a study he undertook on why General Electric moved its headquarters out of Connecticut, and what major employers in a range of industries are seeking, with state fiscal stability, a quality workforce and better roads and public transportation cited by executives with whom he has spoken.
“How about for the first time in generations you have a governor who actually started a business and created jobs, here in a state that’s near the bottom of the barrel in starting businesses and creating jobs?” Lamont said in a July debate at Fairfield University moderated by Hearst Connecticut Media. “That’s how we start growing the economic pie again ... That’s how we get to our balanced budget and that’s how we get Connecticut moving again.”
For his part, Stefanowski is promising to phase out the state’s income tax over eight years as well as inheritance taxes, citing data that Connecticut’s economy grew at the fastest rate of any state over 15 years prior to Hartford’s 1991 enactment of an income tax.
“Not only can we get rid of the state income tax — we have to get rid of the state income tax,” Stefanowski said in early August during a Republican candidate debate at Fairfield University. “I’m not saying it’s going to be easy . ... We’re going to fund this tax cut by ripping costs out of this state like you’ve never seen.”