On MLK Day: Which Clevelanders' jobs are worth least?

No surprises, but it's Martin Luther King Day so let's put it out there. From the same source as the last few posts, the U.S. Census' most recent American Community Survey (2010-2012 Three Year Estimate):

Note well: The median pay of a fully employed African-American or Hispanic Cleveland resident qualifies him or her -- if he or she is the only earner in a family of four or more -- for Federal food assistance and Medicaid.

It's easy to forget (especially when we're so seldom reminded) that King's last days were spent in Memphis supporting a strike by low-income African-American sanitation workers demanding union recognition:

... [T]he sanitation men had been asking the city for recognition of their union and for a resolution of their many grievances since 1963. These workers lived below the poverty level while working fulltime jobs, and 40 percent of them qualified for welfare to supplement their meager salaries. [My emphasis]

 Not unlike some of our neighbors in 2014.

Success stories

So, here's the point of the previous three posts:

The Clevelanders whose minimal average paychecks are discussed in these posts are not "the poor", as this term is generally used. They aren't unemployed, or stuck in part-time or seasonal work. They aren't "on welfare". They're not living on disability checks. For the most part, they're not homeless.

Cleveland has plenty of residents in each of these situations (except for "on welfare", which doesn't really exist any more). But that's not who we're talking about here.

No, we're talking here about the city's success stories. We're talking about the people who got the job -- those who went to work and collected a paycheck for at least 35 hours, for at least 50 weeks out of 52.

According to the Census, only about half of the city's adults who are "in the labor force" during any given year manage to be "full-time, year-round employed". In 2012, according to the Census, about 94,000 Clevelanders achieved this elite status.

And half of them earned less than $32,000 (pre-tax) for that year of work.

What's a job worth in your neighborhood?

"The best anti-poverty program is a job..."

... sometimes. Sometimes, not so much.

From the same American Community Survey data cited in the last post, here are the median 2012 earnings of Clevelanders who worked full-time, year-round in five sectors that, taken together, accounted for about 55% of our city's 94,000 fully-employed residents:

The 2012 Federal “poverty level” for a three-person household was $19,090, and for a four-person household was $23,050.

The eligibility ceiling for SNAP (food assistance) benefits was 130% of these poverty guidelines: $24,817 for a family of three, $29,965 for a family of four.

The ceiling for Medicaid was 133% of the poverty guidelines: $25,390 for a family of three, $30,657 for a family of four.

Compare these "poverty program" thresholds to the median pay levels for full-time workers listed above -- remembering that "median" means half earned less.

The bottom line: A single parent with two or three kids and a full-time job, living in Cleveland, has a pretty good chance of qualifying for Federal food assistance and Medicaid... especially if her job is in food services, retail or “administrative, support and waste management”.

What a job is worth in Cleveland

According to the U.S. Census' most recent American Community Survey:

The median annual pay earned by the 94,000 (or so) Cleveland residents who worked full-time, year-round in 2012 was $32,716.

Divided by 2,080 hours of work, that's $15.73 an hour.

"Median" means that half of the city's 94,000 (or so) fully employed workers earned less. (For comparison, the 2012 median for the whole state of Ohio was $41,759.)

Adjusted for inflation, Cleveland's 2012 full-time year-round earnings median was down 12% from the level found by the Census in 1999 – about $2.16 an hour less.

51% of Cleveland's full-time year-round workers are women. Their median pay earned in 2012 was $30,959. Divided by 2,080 hours of work, that's $14.88 an hour. (Again, this means half of those fulltime female workers made less.)

Source: 2010-2012 American Community Survey 3-Year Estimates, S2404: Industry by sex and median earnings in the past 12 months (in 2012 inflation-adjusted dollars) for the full-time, year-round civilian employed population 16 years and over

Still lazy after all these years

So I'm, um, starting to write here again.

This weblog was started way back in 2003. In July 2006, I switched to a WordPress site (CallahansClevelandDiary.com), which lasted until early 2013, when, for reasons too complicated and boring to explain here, I lost access to the hosting site along with all the files.

But the truth is, Callahan's Cleveland Diary really ran out of steam a year before that. Part of the reason was time; I was lucky enough to get to run a big community technology project funded by Federal broadband stimulus funds (which is my real work) and I just didn't have the bandwidth for blogging. Part of the reason was boredom: I'd spent years writing about the same handful of topics for a shrinking audience (it was never very big in the first place), and it was all getting pretty repetitious.

Well, now the big project is over, a couple of years have passed, and that old itch seems to have returned. So here I am back at the old stand, with some new (or maybe just reconditioned) thoughts to share about "economics, politics and real life in Cleveland".

As for that six years of lost blogging at CallahansClevelandDiary.com, I've managed to salvage a lot of those posts via the still-awesome Internet Archive, and I'm slowly but steadily re-posting them to a new "sibling blog" of this one called Cleveland Diary: The Lost Years.

So, there you have it. Cleveland Diary is back. Thanks for stopping by.