OLMIS

by Dwayne Stevenson
Published Jul-23-2012

The Highs The Lows But What About Starting Wages?

Each year the Oregon Employment Department publishes several wage data points (percentiles and means) for each of several hundred occupations. These wages come from the Occupational Employment Statistics survey. For 2012, wages are published in the 2012 Oregon Wage Information for 660 occupations covering more than 96 percent of Oregon's payroll jobs. The wage data are also available on our website, www.QualityInfo.org.

Statewide, the median hourly wage is $17.28. The median is the value where half the observations are below and half above. Since the median is not adequate to describe the range found in the occupational wage data, we will look at some of the high-wage and low-wage occupations.

Some occupations have wages so high that they are above the range of the survey. Among the occupations which do have published wages, engineering managers have the highest median hourly wage at $62.06. Table 1 lists the 26 highest paid occupations from our estimates. These occupations account for 2.8 percent of all jobs. For four occupations - chief executives, physicians and surgeons, general dentists, and specialty dentists - we cannot estimate their wages.

Occupations at the low end of the wage scale tend to have high employment levels. Eleven of the occupations shown in Table 2 have more workers than the largest occupation showing pay from the highest paid list. Together, the 26 occupations on this list account for nearly 11 percent of all jobs - five times as many jobs as are found among the highest paid occupations. The lowest paid occupations all have median wages within $1.25 of Oregon's minimum wage ($8.80). Many workers in these jobs are also part time; this makes annual wages even lower than could be expected with full-time work.

Let's consider those occupations where the starting wage is at or near Oregon's minimum wage. Focusing on a range of $8.80 to $10.00 per hour for the 10th percentile, a fair proxy in these cases for starting wages, we find these occupations with low starting wages represent just over 25 percent of all jobs. While not all workers in these jobs stay at this wage level, the low starting wage occupations where the median wage continues to maintain this low wage level account for one out of three low starting wage workers.

At the high end of the starting wages, we'll look at occupations with starting wages of $29 or more per hour, or about $60,000 annually on a full-time basis. Starting wages tend to move away from the 10th percentile and closer to the 25th percentile as wage levels increase. So for these higher wage occupations, we select occupations with a 25th percentile wage of $30 per hour or more and then select from that group occupations with 10th percentile wages of $25 per hour or more. The resulting occupations account for just over 7 percent of all jobs. Nearly all of these occupations show median wages of more than $36 per hour - $75,000 annually on a full time basis. In other words, higher wage occupations gain greater separation from their starting wages than do lower wage occupations.