U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
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Workers in the Iowa City Metropolitan Statistical Area had an average (mean) hourly wage of $20.11 in May 2010, roughly 6 percent below the nationwide average of $21.35, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Regional Commissioner Charlene Peiffer noted that, after testing for statistical significance, wages in the local area were significantly higher than their respective national averages in 1 of the 22 major occupational groups: building and grounds cleaning and maintenance. Fifteen groups had significantly lower wages than their respective national averages, including legal, business and finanacial operations, and sales and related.
When compared to the nationwide distribution, local employment was more highly concentrated in 5 of the 22 occupational groups, including healthcare practitioners and technical; food preparation and serving related; and life, physical, and social science. Conversely, nine groups had employment shares significantly below their national representation, including production, protective service, and construction and extraction. (See table A. and box note at end of release.)
One occupational group—healthcare practitioners and technical—was chosen to illustrate the diversity of data available for any of the 22 major occupational categories. Iowa City had 6,540 jobs in healthcare practitioners and technical, accounting for 8.0 percent of local area employment, significantly higher than the 5.8-percent share nationally. The average hourly wage for this occupational group locally was $30.52, measurably below the national wage of $34.27.
With employment of 370, pharmacy technicians was the largest occupation within the healthcare practitioners and technical group, followed by pharmacists (300) and medical and clinical laboratory technicians (240). Among the higher paying jobs were family and general practitioners with mean hourly wages of $109.49. Pharmacists earned $46.33 per hour. At the lower end of the wage scale were opticians, dispensing ($11.75) and pharmacy technicians ($15.17). (Detailed occupational data for healthcare practitioners and technical are presented in table 1; for a complete listing of detailed occupations available go to www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_26980.htm)
Location quotients allow us to explore the occupational make-up of a metropolitan area by comparing the composition of jobs in an area relative to the national average. (See table 1.) For example, a location quotient of 2.0 indicates that an occupation accounts for twice the share of employment in the area than it does nationally. In the Iowa City Metropolitan Statistical Area, above average concentrations of employment were found in many of the occupations within the healthcare practitioners and technical group. For instance, medical and clinical laboratory technicians were employed at 2.4 times the national rate in Iowa City, and pharmacists, at 1.7 times the U.S. average. On the other hand, emergency medical technicians and paramedics had a location quotient of 0.9 in Iowa City, indicating that this particular occupation’s local and national employment shares were similar.
These statistics are from the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) survey, a federal-state cooperative program between BLS and State Workforce Agencies, in this case, Iowa Workforce Development. The OES survey provides estimates of employment and hourly and annual wages for wage and salary workers in 22 major occupational groups and nearly 800 non-military detailed occupations for the nation, states, metropolitan statistical areas, metropolitan divisions, and nonmetropolitan areas.
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OES wage and employment data for the 22 major occupational groups in the Iowa City Metropolitan Statistical Area were compared to their respective national averages based on statistical significance testing. Only those occupations with wages or employment shares above or below the national wage or share after testing for significance at the 90-percent confidence level meet the criteria.
NOTE: A value that is statistically different from another does not necessarily mean that the difference has economic or practical significance. Statistical significance is concerned with the ability to make confident statements about a universe based on a sample. It is entirely possible that a large difference between two values is not significantly different statistically, while a small difference is, since both the size and heterogeneity of the sample affect the relative error of the data being tested. |