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Street wages fly high
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August 10, 1999: 2:39 p.m. ET
State comptroller's report finds financial sector gets biggest bite of Big Apple
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - Look, up in the sky. It's a bird, it's a plane -- no, it's wages on Wall Street.
A new report finds that financial sector salaries are climbing higher than King Kong on the Empire State Building, while other areas are still on the ground floor looking up.
New York State Comptroller H. Carl McCall said in his report on "Recent Trends in the New York City Economy" that wages in the Big Apple grew by more than 9 percent in 1998, according to preliminary data, with non-financial sectors showing the biggest gain in a decade.
However, the biggest increase was on the Street, where the average salary is a wallet-bulging $194,000, up 10 percent from last year. This compares to about $41,700 for non-financial service employees, up about 5.2 percent.
"The salary disparity between Wall Street and the rest of the city continues to grow," McCall said in a statement. "In the last five years, Wall Street salaries have shot up 72 percent while salaries in the rest of the city's economy have only grown 17 percent."
The report said Wall Street employees earn 18 percent of total wages in the city but represent only 4.8 percent of all New York City jobs.
The repeal of commuter tax, McCall said, means that a lot of the biggest Street salaries are leaving town.
'Raises some worries'
McCall noted that while Wall Street's boom times are also good for New York, "the city's heavy reliance on Wall Street for its economic vitality still raises some worries."
The report said job growth for the first half of 1999 remained robust with more than 37,000 jobs added, keeping 1999 on pace with last year's full year gain of 75,000. Business services, trade, culture and media and health and social services are leading the job growth.
However, job growth in upstate New York has been much slower. Unemployment in New York City has been dropping since 1998 and has averaged 7.1 percent so far this year, the report said, but remains high.
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