Six out of the 10 most common jobs in the Cincinnati metropolitan area don’t pay enough to support a family without government assistance, a new study by progressive think tank Policy Matters Ohio says. That’s similar to the situation statewide.
The study of new data from the U.S. Department of Labor looked at how many people worked in various employment sectors and the median wage for each of those industries. The research, completed by Policy Matters’ Hannah Halbert and Isaac Miller, compared those median incomes to income requirements for government food assistance programs. The median yearly earnings provided by the majority of the area’s most common jobs, the study found, would have a family of three eligible for those welfare programs.
In the metro area, the most common job is in the food preparation field, where the median annual salary is about $19,000 a year. About 32,000 people in the area do this kind of work. That’s 7 percent below the federally defined poverty threshold of $20,420 a year for a family of three.
Some other very common Cincinnati jobs pay much better. Fueled by the area’s numerous hospitals, registered nurses were the area’s third-highest occupation. About 23,500 people work as nurses and make a median annual salary of $64,000 a year, according to Policy Matters’ study. But others including waitstaff, janitors and cashiers make under $25,000 a year, an income that would generally qualify a family for government assistance.
The unemployment rate in Greater Cincinnati is the lowest it has been since 2001, according to data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services. The rate in the 15-county area around Cincinnati stands at 3.5 percent. That’s better than Ohio’s 4.3 percent unemployment rate, where Cincinnati was a year ago.
The number of people finding employment is higher than the number entering the workforce, meaning that wages in some sectors should start to rise, some economists say. That’d be a welcome reversal of a long-running trend: nationally and in Ohio, pay has been stagnant in the years since the Great Recession.
That hasn’t happened yet, however, Policy Matters says. Though the region had 1,093,600 jobs last year — almost 50,000 more than a decade prior, at the dawn of the Great Recession — many of those jobs don’t pay as well as they used to. As higher-paying industrial jobs have evaporated, the jobs that have filled the void aren’t nearly as secure or well compensated.
In fact, according to the study, Cincinnati has moved backward in some ways.
“In 2000, five of the 10 most common occupations paid so little that a family of three was left dependent on food assistance to get by — now it’s six,” the study reads. “Some occupations paid less as a share of poverty in 2017 than they did a decade and a half ago.”
That increase comes as officials look to winnow down various forms of public assistance for lower-income Americans. A proposal from the Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson last week, for example, would triple the amount many of America’s lowest-income families in subsidized housing would need to pay toward their rent.
Similar deep cuts have also been proposed to federal food aid programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. One potential plan making its way through Congress could slash as much as $20 billion from the program nationally.
This article appears in Apr 25 – May 2, 2018.
