THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 10, 1995 TAG: 9504080172
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ted Evanoff
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
When it comes to attracting industry, you hear a lot about the South's advantages. There's quality of life. Cost of living. Labor unions. Work ethic. Wages. And roads. Real good roads.
You'll hear one more when the Inc. 500 convention comes to Tidewater: Educated workers.
Bosses from 500 small companies located throughout the nation plan to meet May 18 at the Waterside Marriott Hotel in Norfolk. The event will be Inc. magazine's annual toast to 500 small businesses on growth streaks.
Inc., a publication that caters to small business owners, each year picks hot companies and convenes the chief executive officers and their families for three days. They usually meet in a medium city that goes out of its way to make the CEOs feel at home.
Of course, the host city touts itself as a fine place where a CEO can put down roots. In this respect, Hampton Roads will put on its best face, as well it should. This is an opportunity to diversify the economy. Among 500 CEOs, surely a handful must need a site on the mid-Atlantic coast.
When it comes to courting small business, though, there's an interesting angle. Megadeals like the BMW car assembly plant in South Carolina turn on wages, proximity to parts suppliers, public finance. You want the governor on hand with a bucket full of money.
Inc. 500 companies aren't desperately seeking low pay scales, weak unions or tax breaks, the South's customary advantages.
They're looking for the kind of business infrastructure that can support them,'' said Bill Holloran, head of the Hampton Roads chamber's Small Business Development Center.
That's especially true of technology businesses. Holloran figures maybe as many as 100 of the bosses coming to Norfolk run high-tech enterprises. They don't just use high-tech gear. They are high tech. They're in fields such as biotechnology, telecommunications or information technology.
Infrastructure for them means access to capital, market analysis, design and engineering services. And it means something else: Educated workers.
``They evaluate the workforce for its knowledge basis,'' Holloran said. ``They want to make sure its an educated workforce and it's a skilled workforce.''
No doubt the chamber can show off a wide range of skills in Hampton Roads. There're Eastern Virginia Medical School and Old Dominion University, Christopher Newport University and Tidewater Community College, the College of William and Mary and Virginia Wesleyan College, NASA Langley Research Center and CEBAF, the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility.
And there's the military. Programs on the ships and bases train and employ tens of thousands of skilled people.
What's not here, though, are the incomes. You might expect a skilled workforce would command high wages.
Even in Virginia Beach, Tidewater's wealthiest city and Virginia's largest, only about one of every 10 households earned more than $75,000 in 1990 from all sources. The median average household income in Virginia Beach was about $45,000.
To pick a few Tidewater cities for comparison, Chesapeake's median household income was about $38,000, compared to about $29,000 in each Norfolk, Portsmouth and Williamsburg. All were exceeded by the Virginia median average of almost $40,000. Median means middle - half the households had more income and half had less.
What the household incomes don't reveal is the cut of inflation. Hampton Roads' average civilian wage was $434 a week last summer.
While this was up from $305 a decade earlier, inflation eroded the gain - $305 in '84 had a buying power equal to what $436 bought last summer. The average wage afforded less in '94 than in '84, according to data of the Virginia Employment Commission and the Hampton Roads Planning District Council.
Certainly skilled workers can command strong wages. But you're left with an undeniable conclusion. This is a low-wage region partly because good jobs are scarce.
Trying to attract Inc. 500 companies helps. But even if 25 of them opened in Hampton Roads, we'd gain maybe 2,000 jobs in a region where about 20,000 men and women turn 18 every year.
Inc. 500 businesses are worth courting, but a solid economy takes years to develop. The future is in the classroom. It's making sure the graduates of the high schools and colleges are prepared for a technical society.
KEYWORDS: WAGES HAMPTON ROADS by CNB