The annual “State of Iowa Report” finds Iowans losing ground when it comes to work-hours and pay. University of Iowa professor Peter Fisher co-authored the report titled “The State of Working Iowa 2003” and says we’ve lost a lot of good jobs and it’s getting harder for a worker to earn a living wage. Iowa’s lost a lot of its better-paying manufacturing jobs, and professionals who should be earning top wages like teachers and nurses rank 35th and 50th in the nation for pay. Officially he says we’re twenty months past the end of the recession, but it still affects the jobless rate, which peaked last month at 4-point-6 percent in Iowa. Fisher says Iowans are working more than ever before, and rank second in the country for the number of hours worked. While a “boom” in the latter half of the 1990s pushed wages up, but it’s once again a “buyer’s market” for labor, Fisher says, and wages have stagnated. The study finds Iowa leads the nation in the per-capita number of two-parent families in which both parents work fulltime, and they punch in an average of four-thousand 86 hours. If 4,000 is the average, Fisher says that’s the equivalent of two fulltime jobs so part of the average is some two-parent families working more than two fulltime jobs. Median pay shrunk for workers in the state and work hours slightly expanded, according to the report.
