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Study: 40 Percent of State's Jobs Don't Offer 'Living Wage'

Posted on: Wednesday, 28 December 2005, 03:02 CST

By McKee, Jennifer

HELENA - About 40 percent of all jobs offered in Montana pay less than the $9.07 an hour needed for a worker to bring home a "living wage" here, a new study shows.

The report, called "Searching for Work that Pays: 2005 Job Gap Study," was released Thursday by the nonprofit Northwest Federation of Community Organizations, a Seattle-based group associated with Montana People's Action.

The group identified "living wage" as enough money to pay the costs of child care, health care, housing, food, transportation, utilities and a small savings. The group included only basic phone service - no long distance or cell phone service - and omitted things like cable television or other entertainment costs. The report tallied the costs by state in Montana, Washington, Oregon and Idaho.

Using those figures, the average single adult in Montana needs to earn $18,858 a year, or $9.07 an hour, to realize a living wage. A worker with one child needs to make $30,964 a year, Or $14.89 an hour.

Such jobs are relatively hard to come by, the report shows. For every one job that pays a living wage, there are five Montanans seeking work.

Single parents or families in which only one spouse works have it even tougher, A single worker with two children must make $18.46 an hour, or $38,396 a year, to have a living wage.

Some 80 percent of all jobs offered in Montana pay less than that, the report showed.

Crystal Rondeaux of Billings earns less than the living wage. The 2002 college graduate and mother to 18-month-old Cadence works at professionally licensing foster care parents - a line of work she chose, Rondeaux said, because she wants to make a difference in someone's life.

She earns $9.90 an hour, almost $5 an hour less than the living wage for a worker and one child.

Her monthly expenses are cheap: $400 for rent; $260 for gas, electricity, water and phone combined; $200 for groceries and diapers; and about $200 for transportation. The biggest expense is child care, which runs $525 a month.

"That's not an area where a mother can skimp," she said. "You can't just pick somebody off the street and leave your daughter with them for the majority of her day."

Her employer offers health insurance, but Rondeaux can't afford the $320 monthly cost.

Rondeaux said there's no way she can make regular payments on the student loan that allowed her to get the $9.90-an-hour job, which she considers relatively well-paying. Will Pittz, co-author of the study, said the fall in wages is tied to a shift toward service sector jobs in the Northwest. However, Pittz said he encountered many people like Rondeaux, who had college degrees and professional jobs and still earned less than a living wage.

"College is not the ticket to financial stability that it used to be," he said. "I wouldn't say that higher education isn't something that is not worth pursuing, but at the same time it it's certainly no guarantee."

One of the biggest problems in achieving a living wage, Pittz said, is the rising cost of health care and health insurance.

Only one-half of working-age Montanans had health insurance through their employer. Twenty percent had no insurance at all.

Pittz said he encountered another group of people, too: families who had health insurance, but were living so close to the bone, they couldn't afford the $500 and up yearly insurance deductible.

In both cases, workers often skipped regular health care, he said.

Pittz said the government could help alleviate the situation by expanding public health insurance programs like Medicaid, which now only covers people living near the federal poverty line.

He also said business has a role to play.

"Businesses have a responsibility to the communities in which they operate to provide wages that will support families," he said.

Copyright The Missoulian Nov 18, 2005

Source: Missoulian

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