 |
|
New Bedford adds 415 new jobs over five year period –
defies statewide pattern
By Steve Urbon
 Standard-Times
senior correspondent
New Bedford and Brockton may have missed much of the
wave of high-tech jobs in the past decade or two, but a
new study finds the two cities also avoided a
decade-long drain in high-tech jobs that afflicted every
other metro area in Massachusetts.
The report, "Mass Jobs: Meeting the Challenges of a
Shifting Economy," surveys the landscape and finds
Massachusetts ranks 49th in job creation among the 50
states (Connecticut is 50th), and that it struggles to
match jobs with the best-educated work force. The result
is out-migration as frustrated, well-educated people
continue to go elsewhere.
The challenge now is to employ everyone, including
former manufacturing workers, in an economy built around
specialized jobs in "boutique" employers, said MassINC,
the nonprofit think tank that sponsored the study.
Overall, Massachusetts is down 100,000 jobs from its
peak in 2001, and the shrinking high-tech sector carries
much of the blame, says the report. This state was more
invested in it and had more to lose when high technology
started shrinking.
Not only that, but increased competition from such
states as Florida and North Carolina meant that
Massachusetts now has a smaller share of the high-tech
jobs that remain.
It is the same across the board, with Massachusetts
essentially flat while 31 million jobs were added
nationwide since the 1980s. The Bay State is losing its
share of many job sectors, said the report.
"The job loss has been so great that it wiped out the
gains in sectors where we added jobs. For the first
time, Massachusetts added no net jobs over an entire
decade," said MasssINC Executive Vice President John
Schneider.
North Andover took the worst beating, losing 27 percent
of its payroll jobs in one event, the closing of Lucent
Technologies. "Downsizing, restructuring, outsourcing
and other factors" eroded the high-tech sector
everywhere else.
New Bedford, meanwhile, actually added 415 jobs in the
five years ending in 2006, defying the statewide trend
of overall job loss. SouthCoast had ups and downs, with
Rochester, Acushnet and Fairhaven dropping, and
Dartmouth and Wareham growing — sometimes with jobs
transplanted from businesses in other towns, such as
Titleist.
Freetown was the big winner, adding 1,517 jobs, a growth
of 72 percent, mostly at the enormous new Stop & Shop
distribution facility. Percentage-wise, it led the
state.
Andrew Sum, of Northeastern University's Center for
Labor Market Studies and the author of the report, said,
"the high levels of out-migration are strongly linked to
poor performance in job creation."
It's not as though Bay Staters are uneducated; they have
the highest achievement levels in the nation. But 90,000
jobs are open today because people aren't being matched
to the needs, the report found.
The net result: there are 286,000 fewer people in the
state than in 2001. Only New York and Louisiana, which
suffered from Hurricane Katrina, lost more people in
that time period, said the report.
Create the jobs and out-migration will slow or even
stop, as it has done before, said Dr. Sum. "In order to
solve one you've got to solve the other."
What will solve it? MassINC suggests biotechnology and
related manufacturing jobs, which are already on the
increase faster here than anywhere else in the nation,
but which will probably not account for any more than a
single-digit percentage of the overall job picture.
Something else is needed to recover from the drop in
manufacturing jobs, which accounted for 24 percent of
all Bay State jobs in 1983 and 9 percent now.
One possibility is training people to fill the many jobs
open in the health-care field, including nursing.
But MassINC puts its bets on "boutique economy" jobs
that create goods and services for export to other
states or other countries. These jobs, for the most
part, will be filled by people with specialized skills,
said the report.
So far, said the authors, the state hasn't found a way
to coordinate its economic development strategy, or even
to support the regional strategies developed by planning
organizations such as the Southeastern Regional Planning
and Economic Development District.
Dana Ansel, MassINC's director of research, asked about
the effect of casinos on the jobs picture, deflected the
question as being too far-reaching in its spillover
effects to be understood in the context of the new
study.
The report's other findings:
* From 2001 to 2006, Massachusetts lost about 3.6
percent of all jobs.
* Big cities lost a bigger share, an average of 6.6
percent, with Brockton and New Bedford alone gaining
jobs.
* Eight counties lost jobs; those that gained were
Plymouth, Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket in the
southeast, and Berkshire and Hampshire in the west.
* The counties with the most jobs to lose suffered the
greatest rate of loss: Middlesex dropped 7.4 percent and
Suffolk dropped 6.6 percent.
On the Web:
www.massinc.org Contact Steve Urbon at
surbon@s-t.com
November 28, 2007 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
