Analysis says Ohio losing high-tech jobs

Asso­ci­ated Press

MEDINA — An analy­sis of state job data has con­cluded that Ohio has lost thou­sands of high-tech, high-pay jobs, as indus­tries have shed work­ers or added few jobs.

Data com­piled by the Ohio Depart­ment of Job and Fam­ily Ser­vices showed that employ­ment declined in 24 of 30 indus­tries cat­e­go­rized by the state as both high tech­nol­ogy and high wage. The net loss over the decade totaled about 120,000 jobs. That’s nearly a quar­ter of the approx­i­mately half-million employed in those indus­tries in 2000.

While most of the high-tech indus­try sec­tors in Ohio are man­u­fac­tur­ers, many lost jobs are in indus­tries such as aero­space, chem­i­cal, com­put­ers, tur­bine and power trans­mis­sion, elec­tron­ics and med­ical devices.

And although work­ers in high-tech indus­tries make up only about 10 per­cent of all Ohio work­ers, they earn middle-class wages, aver­ag­ing nearly $67,000 a year in 2011.

The chief of work­force research for the Ohio Bureau of Labor Mar­ket Infor­ma­tion says some jobs, such as main­te­nance and clean­ing, may not have dis­ap­peared, but were out­sourced to firms in the ser­vice sector.

“The job is still in the fac­tory, but it’s not counted as being in man­u­fac­tur­ing any­more,” Lewis Horner said.

Although Ohio’s employ­ment pic­ture has improved over­all in the last cou­ple years, the state saw sub­stan­tial job losses in the past decade. The six high-tech sec­tors that have grown — includ­ing soft­ware pub­lish­ers, com­puter sys­tem design, drug and med­i­cine man­u­fac­tur­ing and col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties — have hired few work­ers. Fewer than 27,000 new jobs were added statewide since 2000, Horner said.

Some researchers argue that the basics of the U.S. econ­omy have changed and slower job growth and higher unem­ploy­ment are the norm.

“I think it’s a struc­tural change in econ­omy needed to be glob­ally com­pet­i­tive,” said Mead Wilkins, direc­tor of Med­ina County Job and Fam­ily Services.

Many work­ers already have dropped out of the mid­dle class due to pres­sure on wages in the global econ­omy, and the pro­por­tion of middle-class fam­i­lies has been going down for the past decade and prob­a­bly will con­tinue to shrink, he said.

Wilkins sug­gests that a better-educated labor force could help.

“We just have to be smarter than the rest of the world,” he said. “That’s the only way we’re going to con­tinue to be an eco­nomic powerhouse.”

But some experts such as Alan Tonel­son argue that edu­ca­tion alone won’t help Amer­i­can work­ers get jobs. He main­tains that U.S. trade pol­icy gives Third World coun­tries and unfair advan­tage in global markets.

Devel­op­ing nations under­stand the value of improv­ing its population’s edu­ca­tion and skill lev­els, but they retrain such enor­mous amounts of sur­plus labor that their wages will remain very low even for highly skilled work­ers, said Tonel­son, a researcher with the United States Busi­ness and Indus­try Council.

Bethany Dentler, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Med­ina County Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment Corp., was more optimistic.

She agrees that many jobs are not com­ing back, but believes “there are other jobs around the corner.”

Posted by AP News on Jan 27 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.