THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, January 8, 1996 TAG: 9601060179
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Talk of the Town
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Out on the talk show circuit, Jeremy Rifkin is known both for his recent book, The End of Work, and provocative comments like this: ``The economy is losing purchasing power. There's not going to be enough income out there to empty the shelves.''
If it is the end of work, you'd be hard-pressed to convince Robin Toth, a Peninsula resident who just happened to land her second part-time job last week.
Toth and several hundred job seekers lined up in the Hampton Holiday Inn to apply for work with catalog retailer Newport News Inc. Toth and nearly 100 others were hired for telephone customer service jobs by the apparel retailer.
``I liked the flexibility of the hours,'' Toth said. ``I didn't want to travel to Norfolk or Chesapeake to find work when there are jobs right here.''
One of those jobs she herself landed a few weeks ago at MCI Telecommunications Inc.'s new marketing center in Newport News. She'll work both jobs part time. ``I'm a single parent,'' she said. ``I have to pay the bills somehow.''
It is one person working two part-time jobs instead of one person working one well-paid job that Rifkin, president of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington, has in mind.
As technology and the international economy revamp the workplace, so have wages flattened for average U.S. workers. There are jobs that command high pay, but they usually are in technical fields with a shortage of workers, fields where employees must step in trained in specific skills.
This emphasis on a technically literate labor force has produced some bleak assessments other than Rifkin's.
``The problem is starkly simple,'' says Richard J. Barnet, senior fellow at the liberal Washington think tank Institute of Policy Studies. ``An astonishingly large and increasing number of human beings are not needed or wanted to make the goods or to provide the services that the paying customers of the world can afford.''
Hampton Roads, where more than 800,000 civilians and military personnel are at work every day, frets not about The End of Work, but about pay. Tidewater produces more jobs than it loses, but the new jobs tend to pay less than the lost jobs. Tidewater wages last summer averaged $445 a week, no more than '85 when wages are adjusted for inflation.
In fact, real pay (wages, salaries and benefits) has increased in the United States on average at an annual rate of only 0.4 percent since the early '70s, compared to 2.5 percent in the quarter-century after World War II.
Despite weak pay raises, Tidewater's economy was cushioned in part in the '80s by the entry of tens of thousands of women into the workforce for the first time.
Working women provided a second income in many homes, allowing household income to rise even as average wages flattened, noted economist John Whaley of the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.
Although dual-income homes cushioned the region's economy, the proportion of women in the workforce no longer rises at a significant rate. This suggests it'll take more than two incomes for a family to get ahead. It'll take technical literacy.
Westward ho: Robert E. Olson will resign as planning and development director of the Virginia Biotechnology Research Park in downtown Richmond. He'll head the the Fitzsimons Redevelopment Authority near Denver.
``With a dozen tenants now in the project, and with $65 million in capital commitments, it is also startling to remember that the decision to proceed with the research park was made only four years ago,'' Olson said.
Jobs, jobs, jobs: The latest regional branch office to open in Hampton Roads apparently will be a ValuJet Airlines reservations center in Newport News.
The airline joins a new wave of national and regional companies that have disclosed plans to locate branches in Tidewater.
These include the Avis car rental operation headquarters in Virginia Beach (500 jobs), the Canon technical service center in Chesapeake (200 jobs), the Gateway 2000 computer assembly plant in Hampton (possibly 1,000 jobs), the Lillian Vernon warehouse expansion in Virginia Beach (300 jobs), the MCI Communications customer service center in Newport News (possibly 1,000 jobs), the Trans World Airlines reservation center in Norfolk (500 jobs), and the United Parcel Service package tracking center in Newport News (up to 1,000 jobs).
Typical of the pay scale of many of the new firms are the wages at MCI and UPS. They range between $6.50 and $9.50 an hour. by CNB