Close to seven years after the end of the Great Recession, many Connecticut working families have been left out of the economic recovery. This is the key finding in our new report "The State of Working Connecticut", that we are releasing today.
The report shows that although employment has improved, an increase in the share of low-wage jobs, slow wage growth and persistently high unemployment for minorities and workers without a college education has left many working families still struggling. Many of these changes have been building up for more than a decade, and now threaten the long term well being of our state.
Our main findings are:
Unemployment has recovered for whites and college-educated workers, but not for workers of color and those without a college education. For workers of color, unemployment is nearly triple that of white workers.
Since 2001, the share of private-sector jobs in low-wage industries has increased by 20 percent, while the share of private-sector jobs in high-wage industries has decreased by 13 percent.
The median wage and the wage for the bottom 10 percent workers has declined 2 percent since 2002. In the same time period, wages for workers at the top 10 percent have risen more than 11 percent.