Average weekly Dayton wage below 2007 level: What’s really going on

From one point of view, the news on wages isn’t good: Adjusted for inflation, average weekly earnings in Dayton dropped from $940 in 2007 to $740 in 2018, Stock said — a dramatically steep plummet compared to the nation.

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Nationally, average weekly earnings have risen from $872 to $936 in the same period — and in the Cincinnati metro area, earnings have also risen, from $890 to about $922.

That fall in local wages is so severe that Stock confessed that he “spent years trying to see how I miscalculated this graph.”

But he said the decline is accurate, and it’s tied to a “dramatic decline” in the number of manufacturing jobs.

There were 47,300 manufacturing jobs in the Dayton metropolitan statistical area in January 2007, according to Federal Reserve numbers, a number that that has fallen to 43,600 such jobs in February 2019.

Even further out: There were close to 79,000 Dayton-area manufacturing jobs in early 1998, according to federal data.

However, since the depths of the Great Recession, manufacturing employment has grown slowly but steadily in Dayton: The Fed shows that these jobs have risen since a nadir of 34,700 in January 2010.

And Stock insisted there is good news on the wages front, pointing to a $40-a-week increase for the Dayton area since 2015 that he pronounced “pretty respectable.”

Confining the view to wages since 2015, the news is better. “My graph needs to start at 2015,” Stock told listeners.

With a labor market tightening in recent years, wages have seen some upward pressure.

Stock said his “message” is: “Average weekly earnings are doing very well in the Dayton metropolitan area relative to where they were a few years ago.”

A particularly strong area of growth has been health and education, especially health, Stock said.

In the Dayton metro area, education and health jobs are 131 percent of what their numbers were in the year 2000, indicating good growth of 31 percent in that sector in the past 18-plus years.

Nationally, that sector has grown by 59 percent. “Think about that for the country as a whole,” Stock said.

Many federal jobs locally are tied to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which with nearly 30,000 military and civilian jobs is the state’s largest single-site employer.

Dayton’s federal government employment is a bright spot. It has grown by three percent since the year 2000, stronger growth than in the nation as a whole or Ohio and the Cincinnati area, allowing for some slight declines due to federal sequestration.

“This is a big deal for us,” Stock said.