Labor Report: Iowa’s workforce faces grim prospects

Employees returned to work after Labor Day to face a downward spiral in Iowa’s job quality and accessibility to quality and affordable health care. Recent reports indicate the economic outlook for Iowa’s work force appears daunting, especially when you throw high gasoline and food prices, the housing crisis, and this year’s plethora of natural disasters into the mix.

The Iowa Policy Project (IPP), a nonpartisan think tank in Iowa City, released the fifth edition of its annual Labor Day report, “The State of Working Iowa,” which presents some significant challenges for Iowa’s working families.

“Since the start of the last recession [2001], the Iowa economy has produced less than one-third of the jobs it produced in the same period from the start of the 1990 recession — about 51,000 compared to 189,000 earlier,” David Osterberg, executive director of the IPP, said in a statement. “And as we’ve shown repeatedly, the types of jobs we’re gaining tend to pay less and offer fewer benefits than the jobs we’re losing. The new measures of poverty and income are disappointing, but not surprising.”

Colin Gordon, senior research consultant for IPP and co-author of the report, echoed Osterberg’s conclusions. “The numbers and some of the circumstances are new — but our basic Labor Day story remains: Iowans on balance are becoming less economically secure and having a tougher time getting by,” Gordon said in a statement. “To get a new story line for Labor Days to come, our policy makers must grasp these realities and address them.”

Unlike the job-loss recovery after the 1990 recession, the report notes that Iowa has had a difficult time rebounding and recovering jobs lost during the 2001 recession.

“This has been a meager and uneven recovery,” Gordon said. “It has taken us more than seven years to increase the state’s nonfarm job base by only 3.5 percent — compared with a 14 percent improvement in a similar period of recovery from the 1990 recession.”

Iowa remains a low-wage state, trailing the national average and ranking sixth in the nine-state region in median wage ($14.30 in 2007), with similar rankings at low-wage (20th percentile — $9.28) and high-wage (80th percentile — $22.76) measures. Low and median wages have fallen since 2001, with high wages showing little growth.

“The net results on job quality from the recent business cycle have been daunting,” Gordon said. “In addition, the Iowa economy has added about 110,000 jobs since 1997, but we’ve lost over 150,000 jobs with health coverage over the same span. And at high-, median- or low-wage levels, Iowa now is clustered among the lowest-performing states.”

The report’s findings also indicate that Iowa’s work force has shifted from sectors offering stable, job-based health care to sectors that provide little to no health-care benefits.

New Census Bureau report indicates Iowa’s uninsured population growing

According to the U.S. Census Bureau report “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007,” the number of uninsured Iowans grew by one-third in seven years, while Iowansʼ median income showed slight improvement in 2007 and those in poverty grew.

“The long and short of all the new numbers is that about 1 in 10 Iowans have trouble getting by whether we’re talking about poverty or access to health insurance,” Beth Pearson, research associate for IPP, said in a statement. “And we know the government measure of poverty substantially understates what it means to be poor.”

New information from the U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday showed for Iowa:

- In 2006-07, uninsurance stood at 9.9 percent, with 291,000 Iowans not covered at some point during the year; that compares with 219,000 uininsured in 1999-2000. Nationally, 45.7 million were without coverage in 2007.

- Median income rose to $47,292 in 2007 from $45,753 the year before — a brighter sign than last year, when this category showed a decline. The 2007 figure represents a 3 percent increase in seven years, from $45,969 in 2000 (2007 dollars), but the change is not statistically significant due to limitations of the survey sample.

- The poverty rate for 2006-07 was 9.6 percent, not a significant change from the 7.8 percent level of 2000-01. For 2007, a separate census estimate* showed the poverty rate at 11 percent.

- Child poverty stood at 13.1 percent in 2007, a level that has not changed significantly since 2000.

“There is good news, and some not-so-good news in these new numbers,” David Osterberg, executive director of the IPP, said in a statement. “It’s good to see the increase in median income from 2006 to 2007. To look at this over time, however, it’s nothing to celebrate.

“Looking at this from the peak of the last business cycle, in 2000, to what appears to be the peak of the current cycle, it appears median income has increased about 3 percent,” Osterberg added. “Since the sample of people surveyed is small, we can’t be sure of the change, so the increase isn’t statistically significant. The Census has the best information we can get, but it isn’t perfect.”

Pearson noted the health-insurance figures present an important measure of economic health for Iowa, where the uninsurance rate rose from 7.9 percent in 2000-01 to 9.9 percent in 2006-07. Comparing those two-year averages, only Missouri and Nebraska had greater increases in their uninsurance ranks.

“The news may not be that surprising,” she said. “As health-care costs have increased, employers have been cutting back on coverage. When 72,000 more Iowans in just seven years do not have access to private or public health-insurance coverage, this is a significant change and itʼs significantly bad.”

The poverty figures, particularly for child poverty, concerned Mike Crawford, senior associate at the Child & Family Policy Center (CFPC) in Des Moines.

“These figures show things are not getting better for people in poverty in Iowa,” Crawford, who directs CFPCʼs Iowa Kids Count initiative, said in a statement. “This presents a special challenge to Iowa policy makers to look for ways to improve access to critical services for a population of significant size in our state.”