Two Decades Later, Still Waiting for Jobs

June 11, 2009

It’s a big year for anniversaries. Neil and Buzz became mankind’s first moonwalkers 40 years ago next month. November will see the Gipper’s 49-state landslide hit the quarter-century mark. And we’ve already passed the ten-year anniversaries of the Columbine bloodbath and NATO’s assault on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

Connecticut “celebrates” an important milestone in 2009, too. It’s been 20 years since the state experienced private-sector job growth.

No two economists would agree on the exact date. The arcana that bedevil labor researchers -- the conversion from one industrial-classification system to another, “payroll” versus “household” employment, seasonal adjustment, whether to consider tribal-casino positions government work -- make perfect precision unattainable. But few would quarrel with 1989 as the high-water mark for private employment in the Nutmeg State.

According to Connecticut Department of Labor data, that year’s average for non-government employment was 1.458 million. Then a recession struck, leading to the enormous fiscal imbalance that produced 1991’s disastrous decision to enact a job-killing, broad-based income tax. Private employment didn’t start to rebound until 1993, and growth was glacial.

Connecticut almost topped its private-sector peak in 2000, with 1.451 million positions. Then came the dot-com implosion.

Seven years later, the apogee was again within reach. Then the housing bubble burst, the credit crisis arrived, and Wall Street tanked. As of last month, the state had 1.391 million private-sector jobs, and it doesn’t look like the trend will be headed in the right direction anytime soon.

In the happy talk of the state’s corporatist establishment, Connecticut is a workers’ paradise. In 2007, State Senator Gary LeBeau (D-East Hartford), a lifetime government employee who fancies himself an economic-development expert, offered this assessment: “Connecticut excels at information technology jobs; graduating an educated workforce; paying high wages; and offering a plethora of managerial, professional, and technical jobs, in which we’re third in the nation.”

Sounds great, right? There’s a problem, though: The “managerial, professional, and technical” positions LeBeau extols are vanishing. Between 2000 and 2007, greater Waterbury lost 31 percent of its manufacturing jobs. In the same seven years, the New Haven area lost 21 percent of its publishing, broadcasting, and telecommunications jobs, and the Stamford-Bridgeport region lost 29 percent of its managers.

Statewide, information-sector jobs are down by 8,000 since 1989. Financial employment fell by about 15,000. The trade, transportation, and utilities category dipped by 28,000. Manufacturing has been hit the hardest, plummeting more than 130,000.

The “high wages” LeBeau describes would be news to most Connecticut workers not on government payrolls. As the lefty lobbying organization Connecticut Voices for Children notes: “In recent years, the industry sectors in which Connecticut lost the most jobs pay more, on average, than the industry sectors in which Connecticut had the greatest job gains.” After adjustment for inflation, U.S. Census Bureau figures reveal that median household income is falling -- meaning the typical Connecticut family is getting poorer. (Taxes keep getting higher, as do prices for essential goods and services.)

Click around on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics website and you’ll learn that no other state -- not even Michigan -- has fewer private-sector jobs in 2009 than it did in 1989. Connecticut’s in a class by itself.

A state that isn’t growing its private-sector workforce can’t produce a higher quality of life for its residents. It can’t retain young adults, who flee as quickly as they can secure employment elsewhere. And as we see with multi-year, billion-dollar deficits, it can’t raise enough tax revenue to pay for bloated bureaucracies.

The inability of its productive sector to create jobs is the greatest threat facing Connecticut. But the state’s “leaders” are more interested in regulating carbon dioxide and apologizing for slavery than making the glaringly obvious changes (e.g., tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, welfare limits, public-employee layoffs) needed to address an imploding economy.

In the noir classic “Touch of Evil,” Hank Quinlan, the corrupt cop played by Orson Welles, asks a fortune teller to read his future.

“You haven’t got any,” she tells him.

“What do you mean?” he demands.

“Your future is all used up.”

Connecticut has spent 20 years squandering its future, and as a result, it faces a dark fate.

Elites can kid themselves -- and voters -- about “green” jobs, “Hollywood East,” nanotechnology, and “cool cities” as the means to revive the state’s economy and escape nightmarish fiscal problems. They can spend billions of taxpayer dollars on politically driven -- and politically correct -- corporate-welfare schemes.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the economic carnage continues. And time is running out.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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