THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510070260
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MYLENE MANGALINDAN, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
They call them cheap jobs.
Telemarketing, customer service, technical support, airlines reservations - these all form the foundation of the service industry.
But the service industry gets a bad rap. Even the Virginia Employment Commission thinks so.
Service jobs aren't all minimum-wage. A lot of the smugness concerning these ``bad jobs'' is misplaced. Some service jobs pay wages higher than factory positions, and yet a lot of people turn up their noses at them.
The Virginia Employment Commission, which tracks job and wages data for the commonwealth, defended the service industry when it released in December 1994 the third edition of a report entitled ``Good Jobs/Bad Jobs.''
People often compare these ``bad jobs,'' which accounted for 55 percent of Virginia's total employment growth from 1985 to 1992, to manufacturing jobs, which are perceived to pay significantly higher wages.
Although manufacturing jobs pay more than service jobs on average, not all earn high wages.
Gateway 2000, which just decided to open a light manufacturing and computer distribution center in Hampton, will pay its employees an average of $18,000 annually. That's just below $9 an hour for a 40-hour week.
Dennis Donovan, a partner with Wadley-Donovan Group Ltd., an international corporate relocation firm , said most of his manufacturing clients start their employees at $6-$10 an hour, the same range as many back-office operations.
``Basically, the notion that these are dead-end, low-paying jobs is totally false,'' Donovan said of back-office jobs.
The VEC report goes further to debunk the service industry's bad reputation.
``Over four out of every five (81.9 percent) jobs created in the state during the period under study (1982-1992) would be in industries which pay above-average wages and therefore would be considered `Good Jobs,' '' the study concludes about service-industry employment.
High-wage service-industry growth accounted for 37 percent of growth for all industries, the study reported. Most growth was concentrated in three sectors: engineering, accounting, research and management services, which combined pay an average $745 weekly; health services, $500 per week; and business services, $466.
Another source of the service industry's bad reputation is that ``service industry'' is used as an umbrella term to describe separate employment sectors such as retail. ``Back-office'' jobs benefit a large segment of the population who can't find work or who are the second wage-earner in a household. They can help raise per capita income by employing more of a community's labor pool, said John Whaley, director of economics at the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.
But some service jobs in Hampton Roads do fit the stereotype.
Services in Hampton Roads pay employees an average of $398 weekly, compared with manufacturing's $656, according to first quarter 1995 statistics from the Virginia Employment Commission.
However, back office jobs help keep unemployment very low. Hampton Roads' jobless figure was 4.6 percent in August, well below the national average of 5.6 percent.
``They're fulfilling a major employment need,'' said Tony Crumbley, vice president of research for the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce. ``We can't all be engineers, and we can't all be corporate execs.'' by CNB