Manhattan’s Wages Lead The Country
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The city’s financial sector is lifting the average weekly wages of Manhattan residents, who earned more during the first quarter of 2007 than residents of any large county in America.
New figures from the U.S. Department of Labor show Manhattan residents earned $2,821 a week on average, nearly $1,000 more than the second highest earning region, Fairfield County, Conn. It is an increase of 16.7% from the same time last year.
“These are the highest we’ve seen in Manhattan,” the regional commissioner for the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in New York, Michael Dolfman, said. “We are no. 1.”
If wages were to remain steady throughout the year, Manhattan residents would earn an average salary of $146,692, with residents working in finance pulling in $528,112, based on an average weekly salary of $10,156 during the first quarter of this year.
Wages aren’t expected to remain at these levels, Mr. Dolfman said, adding that first-quarter wages are traditionally higher than those for the rest of the year because they include year-end bonuses and commissions.
“These may be, and I emphasize may be, the high-water mark for bonuses in the financial services industry,” he said.
Preparing for an economic downturn, Mayor Bloomberg last month instituted the city’s first hiring freeze in five years. The budget director, Mark Page, asked city agencies to find areas to cut, and blamed the belt tightening on a slowing of the national economy and the local real estate market. Anne Ruddy, the president of WorldatWork, an association of human resources professionals, said in an e-mail message that the association’s most recent survey, published in August, indicated that planned annual wages were increasing by 3.9% overall for employees in and around New York. “The wage scene in Manhattan does not necessarily reflect how well workers are fairing elsewhere in the New York metropolitan area,” she said.
In Queens, the average weekly wage was $831. It was $788 in the Bronx, $742 in Brooklyn, and $733 on Staten Island, according to the Department of Labor. The national average weekly wage was $885. Fairfield County residents earned an average weekly wage of $1,979, while residents of Suffolk County, Mass. came in third place with an average weekly salary of $1,659. San Francisco residents came in fourth with $1,639, according to the figures.
