More on the uneven pandemic impacts in the workforce

As both the regional and national economies continue to be impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, evidence continues to show that the impacts have been far from even across the labor force. Similar to national trends, employment losses and depressed earnings been much starker for low-wage workers across the Pittsburgh region. The disparity of impacts across different types of workers has produced significant shifts in composition of the workforce and surprising shifts in the regional wage structure.

In the 2nd Quarter of 2020 – the period when Covid-19 related job losses peaked – employment levels across the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) contracted by over 169 thousand jobs, or around 15% of all regional jobs, compared to the 2nd quarter of 2019. Yet, despite the historic scale of job losses, average weekly wages in the Pittsburgh region increased by 7.7% over the same period.

Increased average wages were not the result of wage increases for individual workers, but were primarily the result of selective impacts of job losses within the labor force. As low-wage workers are more likely to have experienced temporary or permanent layoffs as a result of the pandemic, higher-wage workers were far more likely to have retained their jobs. Estimates of average weekly wages are compiled from data on workers currently employed, and do not include those not at work, even if they were recently furloughed due to Covid-19 or for other reasons. The sharp divergence between the scale job losses and increasing wages reflects the magnified impact of job losses for lower-income workers.

Most counties in the Pittsburgh MSA experienced a similar divergence between changes in employment levels and average wages. In the 2nd Quarter of 2020, employment levels across Pittsburgh MSA counties were down between 13.6-18.4% compared to the year prior. But most counties experienced higher average weekly wages ranging up to an increase of 8.3% for workers in Allegheny County. Within the region, only Beaver County experienced a slight (-0.2%) decline in average weekly wages.