Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States, is also home to the most crappy, low-paying jobs in the country. The city’s national crummy job status would not be so odd if Angelenos fare as poorly in educational achievement.
LA County awash in low-paying jobs
The latest figures on Los Angeles County residents’ educational attainment and available employment suggest the difference in pay between a high school graduate and a non-graduate is negligible. About 21% of residents over the age of 25 have earned a high school diploma but no college, and another 22% of that demographic don’t have a high school diploma.
Interestingly, according to the survey, 29.7% of available jobs require no more than a high school degree and about 34.6% don’t even require that much education. So, while there’s plenty of jobs out there, the average worker might have to work 12,000 years to match the annual income of a single Hollywood star like Meryl Streep -- who, instead of thanking local laborers working crummy jobs building sets and applying makeup behind the scenes that led to her Golden Globes lifetime achievement award -- decided use her Golden Globe speech to trash President-elect Trump. She even managed to trash people who happen to be "deplorable" Republicans, of which more than a few million likely invested in one or two of her movies.
High school diploma means little when most jobs are entry level
I digress. While the ongoing Los Angeles crummy job syndrome may have more to do with the relocation of industry to more tax-friendly states and countries, the fact remains that residents are academically over-credentialed for the vast majority of low-paying gigs readily available in the region.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the median wage for all occupations in the county last year was $39,250, and for many of the occupations that are growing most quickly, it’s a lot lower than that: $28,101 in sales, $27,019 in maintenance, and $21,653 in food preparation and serving. Hopefully this kind of backwards progression doesn’t ultimately merge entry-level pay and median wage jobs into one crummy pay rate.
Because Los Angeles is part of California, most Angelenos voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton as they were instructed to do by just about every Hollywood actor/actress that made over $20 million last year. Ironically, the lousy, low-paying job market in Los Angeles has gotten worse, not better after eight years of the Obama administration which was also supported by about 97.5% of Hollywood stars. Meanwhile, many political pundits on both sides of the political spectrum are scratching their head at the volume of vitriolic anti-Trump hate-speech coming out of the region, from the Streep types who shimmer about in Hollywood social bubbles, and 40-room mansions when not crisscrossing the globe choking seagulls with their jet fumes.
Raising minimum wages might make burger flipping in a hot kitchen a bit more tolerable, but such governmental interference in local economies is clearly not the answer to the growing exodus of high-paying jobs from the community. Until Los Angeles becomes more corporation-friendly, residents may have to cut back on movie nights, and wait for the trickle-down economics of Hollywood political pundits to lift them up.
