Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the weekly median earnings of US salaried and hourly workers in the second quarter. The composite median wage was $1,143, which annualizes to about $59,500. This is 3.9% higher than the second quarter median wage in 2023, and higher than the Consumer Price Index (3.2%) for urban workers.
The earnings news was not great across the board. All women in this cohort earned $1,017 weekly, or $52,900 annually. (All men earned $1,253 weekly, or $65,150 annually.) White women earned 19% less than their White male counterparts. Black women earned 7.5% less than their Black male counterparts. Asian women earned 16.9% less than their Asian male counterparts, and Hispanic women earned 13.7% less than their Hispanic male counterparts.
When examined by ethnicity only, Hispanic workers in the cohort had the lowest weekly median earnings at $903, ($46,950 annually). Black workers in the cohort had the second-lowest weekly median earnings at $941 ($48,900). White workers had the second-highest median earnings at $1,167 ($60,700) and Asian workers in the cohort had the highest weekly median earnings at $1,500, ($78,000).
When you look at earnings among women and earnings among minorities, you see the crying need for better wage-earning opportunities for disadvantaged workers.
WCC should offer programs to increase weekly median earnings
Disadvantaged earners may be classified as such because of the work they do, their levels of educational attainment, their need to provide care to children or elders in their households, or for a host of other reasons that may also account for their diminished earning potentials. Regardless, in Ann Arbor (City), Census data show that the number of Black residents has declined by nearly 13% since 2013. The number of Hispanic residents has also declined by more than 21% in the same time. In Ann Arbor, in 2022, 5.6% of family households were headed by women with no spouse present. In 2013, 6.7% of family households in Ann Arbor were headed by women with no spouse present.
No matter how you look at the demographic data, the City of Ann Arbor has fewer disadvantaged workers today than it did a decade ago, and it is not because those workers have found the keys to economic improvement. They’ve simply left the city.
Community colleges – like WCC – could excel at creating employment and earnings opportunities for these disadvantaged earners and remove the need for them to leave the city in an effort to correct their own financial conditions. It is imperative that WCC refocuses its academic programming to incorporate opportunities for workers to access jobs in the high-wage, high-demand economy. WCC cannot continue to churn out workers who are marginally prepared to attempt survival in Washtenaw County in low-wage occupations. This strategy offers no benefit to either the City of Ann Arbor or Washtenaw County. If anything, the migration of disadvantaged workers farther away from where they work and/or where their children attend school makes living in Washtenaw County objectively harder for them.
That’s really not why we fund WCC – especially at the level we do. WCC needs to be more attentive to the needs of the lowest earning residents, by creating opportunities to enter and/or remain in the middle class. The quarterly earnings data merely underscore this.
Photo Credit: Oliver Gouldthorpe, via Flickr
