PhillyInc: Opportunity in technology not extending to wages

We live in a world in which we're all totally wired and technology is touted as the road to opportunity.

But opportunity for whom?

The latest release of an index that tracks wages for temporary help in the tech sector shows the advantage currently lies with employers, not employees.

The Yoh Index of Technology Wages found that demand for temporary skilled tech workers increased in May and June, while wage rates fell. Yoh Services L.L.C., a unit of Philadelphia-based Day & Zimmermann Group Inc., has been benchmarking wages for technical personnel since 2001 and called such an inverted wage curve "extraordinarily rare."

It's not as if tech wages never went down before. After all, the Yoh Index, which samples the paychecks of tech temps at more than 1,000 businesses in aviation, information technology, life sciences, and other tech sectors, was created after the bursting of the tech bubble in 2001. But demand for workers also eroded then.

The current situation is a sudden reversal from the increased demand and increased wages that were seen as recently as March and April, Yoh said. What changed? Well, the overall economic picture got foggy, and the effects of federal stimulus spending began to wear off.

To Yoh, which is in the business of providing technical workers to employers, when employees begin to accept lower wages, it generally indicates they don't expect other opportunities to come around offering higher pay.

Joel Capperella, Yoh's senior vice president of client solutions, said wages in June were down 3 percent year over year. As tech workers realize they are not able to command the wages they once did, more are taking those lower-wage assignments handled by contingent labor.

That may be a great opportunity for employers who can "lock in labor" at suppressed wage rates. But even Yoh sees troubling signs for an economy when employees can't picture their future being brighter than their distressed present.

More clouds

The biggest year-over-year increase in jobless rates among the most populous metropolitan areas occurred in Philadelphia and its four Pennsylvania suburban counties in June.

According to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobless rate in the five counties increased 1.2 percentage points from 8.1 percent in June 2009 to 9.3 percent in June 2010.

The Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, Fla., metro division was second with a 1.1-percentage-point increase.

The largest decrease of 2.3 percentage points was recorded in the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich., metro division. But the Motor City has nothing on our Medical Mecca. Detroit's jobless rate remains the highest among the biggest metro areas at 15.4 percent.