By Melissa Dunson

mdunson@joplinglobe.com

Tammy Green was tired of working $7 an hour jobs, coming home exhausted and still not having the money she and her 3-year-old son, James, needed to move out of her parent’s home.

“I thought, ‘No thank you,’ I can’t do this forever,” Green, of Neosho, said. “We can’t afford to get our own place, so we live with my parents. It’s not the best but we would not be able to make it otherwise. We’d be staying at Soul’s Harbor.”

Green said education was her way out.

Now she attends Crowder College and cares for her son while her fiancé works for a Joplin telemarketing firm making $8 an hour. She said that even when they both worked, their combined income still didn’t cover their expenses.

“Either our wages have got to go up, or gas has got to go down,” Green said on the day gas hit $3.28 a gallon in Joplin.

According to the latest data on per-capita income available from the Bureau of Economic Analysis with the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Joplin-metropolitan area came in 167 among 179 metro areas surveyed in the United States.

Per-capita income in the Joplin metro area — defined as Newton and Jasper counties — was $25,008 in 2005, the last year that information was available. That’s about 73 percent of the per-capita income average for the entire United States in 2005, which came to $34,471.

Cost of living

There is data that indicate the cost-of-living in Joplin also is lower.

Of 298 urban areas in the United States surveyed in the fourth quarter of 2005, for example, Joplin had the second-lowest cost of living, according to the American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Association.





Their quarterly cost-of-living index measures goods and services in six areas: housing, utilities, groceries, transportation, health care, and miscellaneous goods and services.

Joplin had a composite index of 82.4, almost 18 percent lower than the national average.

No excuse

Tom Simpson, Missouri Southern State University political science professor and director of the Regional Economic Development Center, said wages in the Joplin metro area are low, but explanations justifying it by the lower cost of living don’t add up.

The average wage in the Joplin area is $3 less than the state average, Simpson said, and even though housing and other goods and services may be less expensive, the lower cost of living does not account for the full difference.

Simpson also said Joplin-area residents may pay less for health care than people in other parts of the state and the nation, for example, but are sick more, so the lower cost is negated.

He said lower wages are not a conspiracy among business owners, but reflect a basic economic principle: Only 9 percent of Joplin-area residents are college educated, so a large supply of low-skilled workers is available to companies.

“It’s just businesses taking advantage of the over abundance of low-skilled workers,” Simpson said. “To change it, we have to make a long-term commitment to training and schools have to steer these kids to college or trade school.

“We live in the future we create,” he added.

What it takes

The Missouri Department of Economic Development offers a family wage calculator on its website, www.ded.mo.gov. The calculator charts the actual cost of living and working in the state by measuring the cost of housing, food, childcare, health care, transportation and taxes, then figuring how much income a family needs to make each hour, month and year in order to pay for those basic necessities.

Veronica Gielazauskas, a planner with the Missouri Department of Economic Development, said while it’s impossible to get the figures down to the exact penny, the wage calculator is an attempt to get a localized look at costs.

According to the wage calculator:

n A single, uninsured Jasper County mother with two school-age children would need to make $16.47 an hour, or $34,250 a year to cover the basics.

n A two-parent Jasper County family with three school-age children and insurance needs for one working parent to make $13.21 an hour.

n A single uninsured Jasper County resident with no children must make $7.33 per hour just to pay for the basics, 83 cents an hour more than the recently increased Missouri minimum wage of $6.50.

According to U.S. Department of Labor, of the 77,760 jobs in the Joplin metropolitan area, more than 50,000 of them paid less than $10 an hour in 2005.

Mary Little, executive director of United Way of Southwest Missouri, sees the impact of low wages on Joplin-area families every day. Her organization will hand out more than $1 million this year to its partner organizations, but she says the funds still will not meet the needs of the community.

“Our partners put in funding requests this year for $1.2 million,” Little said. “We fund everything we can, but it doesn’t even start to address the need. There’s never enough, there’s always more need.”

Through the Salvation Army in Joplin, Little says more than 30,000 meals were served last year to area people in need.

“I’d say the situation is statewide, Missouri has a high poverty rate,” Little said. “And we see those people who are still barely making it even though they’re above the (federal) poverty level.”



Per-capita income in other Four-State cities

n Springfield, Mo. - $25,295

n Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers - $27,397

n Columbia, Mo. - $27,895

n Salina, Kan. - $28,764

n Oklahoma City-Shawnee, Okla. - $30,022

n Topeka, Kan. - $30,483

n Wichita-Winfield, Kan. - $30,926.

n Tulsa-Bartlesville, Okla. - $31,464

n Kansas City, Kan. and Mo. and Overland Park, Kan.- $33,325

n St. Louis-St. Charles, Mo. and Farmington, Ill. - $33,739.