The El Paso branch of the Dallas Fed publication Crossroads released an article titled "Low-Wage Occupations Remain a Hallmark of El Paso Economy." [article]
The article states that El Paso "has followed national trends in job growth with a steady shift of employment out of manufacturing and into services. It has been a sometimes painful transition for the city, with the number of manufacturing jobs cut nearly in half, from 41,100 to 22,100, between 1990 and 2006."
As that happened, states the article, "services have grown to make up 82.9 percent of private jobs in El Paso, up from 69.7 percent in 1990. … The transition to services, however, has not brought improvement in one key indicator of economic progress."
That indicator is per capita income, and the article goes on to argue that El Paso's education level is linked to the income, and both are low. El Paso's income level is 67 percent of the U.S. average in 2005, according to the article, while Texas was at 94 percent. The article called the low income disappointing, and "so is its lack of sustained progress toward U.S. norms. El Paso was at 64 percent of the U.S. average in both 1995 and 1980. … This lack of progress in relative per capita income can be examined from many directions: the mix of high- and low-wage industries in the city, the low educational achievement level of the workforce or the sustained out-migration of high achievers."
The article goes on to compare El Paso with multiple "peer cities" in studying such measures as the occupations in which people are employed.
The article concludes with this: "Occupational and educational data suggest that a return to the basics—building a more highly educated and better-trained workforce—is the key to raising wages in El Paso and McAllen."
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The article brought to mind a critique of El Paso's economic development efforts written by Anthony Martinez, who founded Newspaper Tree in 2003 and whose articles can be found in the archives.
In an Editor's Letter dated Nov. 2, 2003, he wrote, "Long gone are the days when the Four C's -- copper, cotton, cattle, and climate -- were staples of our economy. Gone too are the days when El Paso could depend on its low-wage labor to fuel low-skilled manufacturing. Now, here we are at the outset of the 21st Century hoping for the best and expecting the worst. Our economy is in the dumps and you know what?
"We've never really been honest about how we got here."
Martinez argued that El Paso focused on manual labor because that is how the leadership of the community saw its people.
He wrote: "On September 11, 1957, the El Paso Times explained, 'More than 50 per cent of El Paso's labor force is of Mexican or Spanish-American descent, whose inherent craftsmanship can be developed into skilled ability in almost any field . . The local plant of W. R. Weaver Co., a leading telescopic gun sight manufacturer [mentioned in the first ad], has demonstrated that the El Paso labor force is psychologically adapted to repetitious work.'
"There it is. How could a labor force hailed for its simple psychological profile ever serve as a foundation for technological achievement? It never could and never would. And after 1994 and the creation of NAFTA, El Paso's labor force became a huge liability rather than an asset."
In the article, Martinez argued that El Paso had not managed to get past its own past, an example shown by recruitment of call centers.
"In 2000, the Chamber provided the public with a pyramid that explained the progressive prosperity of their economic development strategy. What it failed to do, however, was explain how sitting in front of a computer making telephone calls is related to software development or information technology. And arguing that they're related because a computer is a factor in both equations is like arguing that I could be a surgeon because I used a knife at dinner, or that I could be an automotive engineer because I drove to the grocery store.
"If we continue to see ourselves as a city of simple laborers -- and there is plenty of evidence to that effect [i.e. when the Hispanic Chamber was talking about creating a Tech Incubator and the Greater Chamber kept calling it a Manufacturing Incubator] -- then we'll never be real players in the modern economy."
