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9/5/04

EMPLOYMENT TRENDS
Younger boomers have history of job hopping

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The average person born at the tail end of the baby boom held approximately 10 jobs between the ages of 18 and 38, according to a recent report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The government's ongoing survey of 9,964 men and women found that, even as they approached middle age, younger boomers held a larger than expected number of short-duration jobs. This group of boomers held an average of 10.2 jobs, according to the BLS, with the majority holding 4.4 of those jobs between the ages of 18 and 22. The number of jobs held by the respondents fell to 3.3 from age 23 to 27, and dropped to 2.5 jobs between age 33 and 38, the government said. The findings indicate these boomers job hopped a lot more in the early years of their work experience.

But the study also showed that job hopping, though somewhat lower in the boomers' later years, did not stop.

''Although job duration tends to be longer the older a worker is when they start a job, these baby boomers continue to have a large number of short duration jobs even as they approached middle age,'' the report concluded. ''Among jobs started by workers when they were 33 to 38 years old, 39 percent ended in less than a year and 70 percent ended in fewer than five years.''

A BLS spokesman was not sure why the respondents continued to job hop. However, the survey reveals that these boomers ranged from 37 to 45 years old in 2002 and still have many years of work ahead of them. Some could have been impacted by the dot-com boom and bust. And because they are in their prime work years, they likely were affected by the most recent recession.

The report also found that the boomer men who participated in the study spent more time in the workforce than the women. For example, female baby boomers spent, on average, 26 percent of the total number of weeks worked since 1979 out of the labor force, the BLS survey reported. By contrast, men spent 11 percent of those weeks out of the workforce.

Those findings seem to support other reports indicating that women are still more likely to drop out of the workforce than their male counterparts, often to care for children. This trend is not as prevalent today as it was in the past. In fact, more men are taking an active role in raising children and some are taking time off from work to do it. According to the Census Bureau, there are now approximately 2.2 million single fathers in the United States who are actively raising children. In addition, there are 105,000 married fathers with sons or daughters under the age of 15 who have left the workplace to raise close to 190,000 children, the Census Bureau reports.

But dips in employment are still one of the reasons why women's overall earnings lag behind men's, specialists say.

WAGE GAPS
Teachers' paychecks don't keep pace

Teachers aren't making it in America.

Those are the findings reported by economists at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C. The findings, released recently in a new book, show elementary and secondary schoolteachers' weekly wages have eroded over the last two decades while other professionals, including those with comparable educational backgrounds, have seen their weekly earnings grow.

The book, titled ''How Does Teacher Pay Compare?'' charts the weekly income of all college graduates and schoolteachers from 1983 to 2003. However, the erosion in pay among teachers is most pronounced from 1993 to 2003. The authors examined wage data from the Current Population Survey, a national study conducted by the federal government.

''We looked across time at what has happened to the pay of college graduates compared to teachers and there was a big gap,'' said EPI economist Sylvia A. Allegretto. ''The big thing is what has happened over the last 10 years.''

Allegretto said that in the mid- to late 1990s, when demand for professionals was high, many college educated people received bonuses, raises, and other forms of compensation. Not teachers. Their earnings did not keep pace with other college graduates.

In 1983, for example, teachers earned about $654 per week. By contrast, college graduates who were not teachers earned $816. By 2003, college graduates who were not teachers earned $1,078 and teachers earned $833 per week. Between 1996 and 2003, college graduates saw an 11.8 percent boost in weekly earnings. But teachers saw their weekly paychecks rise by only 0.8 percent in that period.

''We found 16 comparable occupations based on national compensation surveys that are similar to teaching, and teachers were at the bottom of that list, too, in terms of pay,'' said Allegretto.

She attributed the gap in pay between teachers and other college educated professionals to several factors. First, she said, the local governments that employ public schoolteachers are not always able to compete with private industry for top workers. Also, as labor markets tightened in the 1990s and the demand for college graduates rose, women had more options. Rather than teach, some highly qualified women entered lucrative fields that had been largely dominated by men.

The study also found teachers have less overtime and shift pay, less paid leave, and fewer wage bonuses than other professionals. They do receive better benefits but those were not enough to significantly offset the erosion in pay, the authors said. ''Teachers in 2002 received 19.3 percent of their total compensation in benefits, slightly more than the 17.9 percent benefit share of compensation of professionals,'' according to the book. ''Those better benefits somewhat offset the teacher wage disadvantage, but only to a modest extent.''

The authors believe the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has raised the need for top teachers and will likely make teacher pay a significant issue in the near future. But, they say, many US schools may find it hard to attract top candidates.

''As labor market opportunities have improved outside of teaching, public schools have lost the captive labor pool they once had with respect to women -- who make up over 75 percent of all kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers -- and are today forced to compete with more lucrative professions for the best college graduates,'' said the book.

Said Allegretto: ''You have to pay teachers better to get more of them into the profession and, if you want the best and the brightest, the pay has to keep up with other professions. We also think that people do not value teaching the way they do a lot of other college professions. In the past, even if you did not value it, it did not matter because most women went into teaching. So, there was a larger supply of exceptional women going into teaching.''

--DIANE E. LEWIS

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