CEOs at public firms in the Buffalo Niagara region aren't doing so bad for themselves, despite the recession, reports David Robinson at the Buffalo News. Media CEO pay was nearly a million bucks - a record - in 2010:
But the story was much different for the average local worker, whose wages remained squeezed by a tight labor market and a continued push by companies coming out of the Great Recession to hold down costs. The annual earnings of workers in the Buffalo Niagara region actually dropped slightly last year, falling by $19 to a median of $35,006, according to data from the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. While median hourly wages went up by a half percent, total annual earnings went down because the typical worker spent about 15 fewer hours on the job last year.
That's not surprising considering the jobs report that came out on Friday. Jacob Goldstein reports for NPR's Planet Money that nearly 14 million Americans are beating the pavement for a job - but more than 2 million people have quit looking, even though they're unemployed.
So who's going to create jobs to put these people back to work? New York's Assembly Democrats think it's going to be them, as the Innovation Trail's Daniel Robison reported last week. You can see a breakdown of the bills that Democrats want to push through before the end of the session on June 20 (and how much they propose to spend), in Joe Spector's blog post at Vote Up!
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