Mama was right: Stay in school

It may not be regionally appropriate to say, “Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys,” but it’s not far off, even halfway across the continent.

The most recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the median hourly wages for 559 occupations in Rhode Island for which data was returned show a significant difference between those jobs at the top of the income ladder and those at the bottom. And while not all of the difference can be attributed to the education required to qualify for the jobs, it is a significant factor.

For instance, at the top of the income distribution is “Management,” with a median hourly wage of $53.67. At the bottom is “Food Preparation and Serving,” with a median wage of $9.50 per hour. Since it is not clear if this includes tips or not, the next lowest median hourly wage, $9.64, is for “Farming, Fishing, and Forestry.”

Perhaps more unsettling is the fact that 58.2 percent of those 471,290 employed workers in Rhode Island have median hourly wages of less than $18 per hour. Put another way, well more than half the workers in the Ocean State have a median salary of $36,720 per year.

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The three largest groups of occupations, “Office and Administrative Support” ($17.65 per hour), “Sales and Related Occupations” ($13.60 per hour) and the aforementioned food prep and serving occupations, are all included in that group.

The three largest groupings of occupations with median hourly wages greater than $20 per hour are “Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations” ($35.63 per hour), “Business and Financial Operations” ($33.60 per hour), and “Education, Training and Library” ($28.15 per hour), although none of this group is larger in number than any of the top three job groupings in the lower-wage cohort.

The result of this wage distribution is a median hourly wage for Rhode Island of $18.77, or $39,050 per year.

As a point of comparison, Massachusetts’ 3.4 million workers have a median hourly wage of $21.91, while Connecticut workers earn a median of $21.07 per hour. •

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