Two new reports paint a devastating picture of Orlando’s economy.
The first is the annual wage survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
It shows that, once again, Central Florida ranks dead last — 50th among the 50 largest metros in America — when it comes to median wages.
It’s the price we pay for an economy built on the backs of hotel housekeepers and theme-park ride attendants. Half the jobs here pay $34,320 a year or less — an amount lower than every other major metro, including smaller cities with lower costs of living.
The second report comes from the Brookings Institution, which scoured the country to see which cities will suffer the most job losses from the coronavirus pandemic.
Two major cities stood out: Las Vegas and Orlando.
In both places, more than a quarter of all the region’s jobs are at risk.
In Central Florida, we’re talking about more than 342,000 jobs — a number larger than the entire population of Orlando.
Together, these two reports illustrate a stark, two-part reality:
A) Even when our economy is churning at full strength, many workers struggle to get by.
B) That already precarious economy and those struggling workers are about to get devastated.
“You’d be hard-pressed to find a more disastrous and particular crisis,” said Mark Muro, senior policy director of Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program.
Muro described it as “uniquely disastrous” for two cities that have resisted calls to diversify their economies.
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Leaders in both towns bet virtually everything on tourism by plowing billions of tax dollars into marketing campaigns and ever-expanding convention centers.
It wasn’t sustainable. One report and study after another warned Orlando about its economic house of cards; that a recession would hit Central Florida harder than most.
But local leaders tuned that out, preferring instead to hear from local economists who rarely chastise them for their low-wage economy and often touted rosy predictions. (“No Recession in Sight for U.S. Economy, Predicts UCF Economist;” “Longest Economic Expansion in U.S. History Will Continue, Predicts UCF Economist“)
Then Covid-19 hit.
Sure, this virus-spawned recession was a surprise. But recessions in general aren’t. We also experienced them after 9/11 and again in 2008.
And they always hit tourist towns hardest. In 2008, 1 out of 15 homes in Orlando was lost to foreclosure — a loss rate triple that of America in general. In Vegas, it was even worse. The banks seized more than 1 in 10 homes in Sin City.
So, when times are “good,” workers here live on the edge of a financial cliff. And when things go bad, they fall right off.
Through the years, this community has found all sorts of creative ways to excuse our dead-last ranking for wages. Most of those excuses are wrong.
Like: Orlando’s wages are so low because our cost of living is low.
False. Years ago, Orlando had low cost-of-living. Not today. Today, we’re around average. Most of the the comparably sized cities with higher wages also have lower costs of living — places like St. Louis where it’s cheaper to live and yet the median wage is 17% higher at $40,164.
Or: The low-paying jobs in Orlando are mostly entry-level jobs meant for young people and retirees.
Wrong. Low-paying jobs run this economy. One out of every four full-time jobs — more than 300,000 of them — pay $23,878 a year or less. And as the Sentinel’s “Laborland” series showed, many of this region’s low-wage workers are parents and heads of households.
Or: If people want a better job, they should just improve themselves and find one.
Fine. And then what? Let’s say that every one of those 300,000 low-wage workers pursues a Ph.D in physics and goes to work for Elon Musk. Guess what? All of those menial jobs will still exist. The hotel bed sheets still need changing. The tables still need busing. And the theme parks still need to be staffed — partly because Orange County spends hundreds of millions of hotel-tax dollars every year making sure those jobs exist.
Jobs that Muro describes as “low-paying, low-benefit and highly precarious.”
I know this is a tough time to have this discussion. But we’ve tried to have this talk before when times were good … to little avail.
“It just never gets done during the good times,” Muro said, adding that economic disasters give communities a chance to re-evaluate. “You have to look at your recovery as an opportunity to be more resilient, inclusive and durable.”
That means investing more in education, health care, technology — sectors that pay more and aren’t so cripplingly reliant upon the ebb and flow of the national economy.
Soon, we’ll be gearing up for recovery. And we obviously need to take care of the hundreds of thousands of workers in this region’s bread-and-butter industry.
But if all we do is look for more marketing dollars for theme parks and subsidies for low-wage sectors, we’ll find ourselves in the same low-wage rut … until the next recession comes along to once again turn that rut into a full-blown disaster.
