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Jon Whiten is with New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP). - promoted by Rosi
Do you feel better off today than you did in 2000? Your job, your home, your retirement - do you feel more secure about all that? If you answered no, you are certainly not alone in the Garden State.
New Jersey's economy in the 2000s did very little to improve the lives of working families across the state, despite income growth during the early part of the decade. As a result, many people are worse off today than they were as we entered the new century.
That's the top-level message in the newest report by New Jersey Policy Perspective, which we released this morning.
More on New Jersey's 'lost decade' after the fold. |
| The report, The State of Working New Jersey 2011: The Lost Decade, offers data on the state's economy, including employment, wages, pay gaps relating to gender and race, and poverty. It also puts New Jersey's economy during the first 11 years of the 21st century in a national context, showing how the state has fared compared to other states around the country.
The report shows what many of us, anecdotally, already know: there are fewer jobs, lower wages, more unemployment, and more poverty among New Jersey's families today than in 2000. Reading through the detailed report, you begin to connect specific people to data sets, mapping the state's economy onto your own social sphere.
That former white-collar worker down the block who now works at Starbucks?
He's a worker in one of the state's few growth sectors: retail, leisure, accommodation and food. We're gaining these and other low-wage jobs in service industries, while we lose well-paid jobs in manufacturing, construction and government.
That laid-off ex-colleague whose severance package is drained and who is wondering how she'll be able to keep making payments on her home?
She's one of the 51 percent of unemployed New Jerseyans who has been looking for work for at least half a year - a figure that is more than double what it was in 2007, and the highest ever recorded (this data collection began in 1979).
The list of examples could go on and on.
And while the recession has been deemed officially over, the situation hasn't quite turned around yet here in New Jersey. The state did weather the downturn slightly better than the rest of the nation, with a 5.5 percent decline in employment between 2007 and 2010 (compared to 5.7 nationally). But since then, as other states are beginning to show signs of recovery, New Jersey has fallen behind.
From June 2010 to June 2011, 41 states experienced employment growth, but New Jersey was not among them (government was a particularly large loss sector as layoffs and early retirements wracked the state). Employment has been slowly increasing this calendar year, but at the current rate employment wouldn't return to 2007 levels until early 2014.
As we note in our report, this stagnant economy disproportionately affects the state's most vulnerable; already we've seen large increases in families and children living in poverty. Let this data serve as a reminder: we've built a relatively robust safety net here in New Jersey; let's not destroy it when times get tough. |
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