Salary Inequity in NJ

Want to earn less money? Take a job below New Jersey’s monetary Mason-Dixon line, the Raritan River. There, according to numbers from various sources, the same job will pay you less.

For example, Leticia Loeser, who says she couldn’t afford the southern New Jersey payroll surcharge, took a job north of the Raritan in Lincoln Park. “I make there in two days what I could make in southern New Jersey in a week,” Loeser says. That job, with Worldwide Industrial Consultants, a temporary employment agency for engineers, pays her $600 a week plus benefits. Before committing to the 109-mile commute from her Manahawkin home, Loeser “looked for a job to no avail,” scouring Ocean and Atlantic Counties. “The most I was offered was $12 an hour,” she says. “I refused. That’s ridiculous.”

Karen Eastwick has been a legal secretary for nearly 30 years. She has worked for a number of law firms in northern and southern New Jersey. In the mid-1990s, she says, she was making $600 per week at attorney William Oliver’s Asbury Park law firm. In 1997 she moved to Gerald O’Connor’s Chatham law firm at $730 per week. After taking a five-month work hiatus for family reasons, she was unable to find an Ocean County job paying a comparable salary. “One firm offered me $450 a week,” Eastwick recalls. “King Kitrick Jackson & Troncone (of Brick) offered me $625 a week.” She was offered $600 at the law firm of Rosenberg and Kirby in Toms River.

The evidence of a salary divide doesn’t come just from disgruntled workers. “You have to use the Raritan River as the break point,” says Marshall A. Goldberg, CEO of Doerner & Goldberg, a firm that supplies certified shorthand reporters to businesses and government offices. Goldberg says the northeast part of the state generates the highest salaries as well as the highest volume of work. “On the low side, an average reporter makes $50,000 up to $75,000 or $80,000 per year,” says Goldberg, who has 60 people on staff. “If you go to Toms River, the reporters probably make 10% to 20% less at the end of the year.” Another illustration: “I have people here who do billing who make $40,000 but won’t make more than $25,000 or $28,000 in Toms River.”

Doris Damm, president of Cherry Hill’s Accu Staffing Services (see Interview, page 15), fills more than 5,000 temporary jobs each week. She cites examples of the Raritan River wage gap, including production workers who make $8 an hour in southern New Jersey but can earn 50% more north of the Raritan for comparable jobs. According to Damm, people working in southern New Jersey earn some 35% less overall than their northern compatriots.

“Raritan is the demarcation line. If we were paying temps $8 an hour here to do assembly work, they would get $12 an hour in North Jersey,” says Damm. For light assembly work such as soldering and packaging, “we would pay $6.50 to $7 per hour in South Jersey. Up in North Jersey, they’d get $9 to $9.50. You can take a secretary here with good skills and we would pay her $12 to $14 an hour. In North Jersey she would get between $19 and $21 an hour doing the same job.”

Why the disparity? Employers often argue that lower wages reflect lower housing costs. And houses are cheaper in the south. Realtor Coldwell Banker, based in Parsippany, offers a home-price comparison index on its Website showing cost variations for a 2,200-sq.-ft., four-bedroom, 2.5-bath house with a two-car garage. What costs $310,000 in Edison would cost $200,885 in Ocean County. But as Coldwell spokesperson Gabrielle Sertich points out, that’s not the way folks buy houses. “People buy what they can afford,” she says, “not a predetermined size of house.” They’ll say, ‘I can have more house for my money if moving from X to Y.’”

And the prices for most of life’s staples don’t drop with the latitude. The average price for a pound of steak will be the same at a ShopRite in Teterboro as in a ShopRite in Toms River. Wal-Mart and Sears charge the same for a suit whether it’s sold in Paramus or Pennsauken. One exception is gasoline prices, which are slightly lower in southern New Jersey.

According to John Sarno, executive director of the Employers Association of New Jersey in Verona, the north-south wage differentials have more to do with employment patterns than living costs. “Traditionally, the north had 90% of the industrial jobs, was unionized and had higher wages,” Sarno says.

Among his group’s membership, an administrative assistant in Bergen County will earn $794 per week, Sarno says. That climbs to $804 in Hudson County but falls to $694 for a comparable position position in Ocean County. Secretarial wages reflect the same trend. On average, secretaries earn $666 in Hudson and $679 in Bergen County. That drops to $600 in Monmouth and $549 in Ocean County. For customer service representatives, the average pay is $624 a month in Hudson and $474 in Monmouth.

Some statistics show narrower salary differences. Compensation Resources, a compensation and human resource consultant in Upper Saddle River, compiled wage comparisons for jobs for employees with two to three years of experience. The data showed that legal secretaries in northeastern New Jersey made an average of $38,668 per year, while those in Burlington, Monmouth and Ocean Counties averaged $36,378 in salary. The gap widened sharply for house painters, who earned $37,044 on average in Middlesex County compared with $30,594 in Ocean County.

Sarno of the employers association expects the southern penalty to ease over time. “Whether lower southern salaries are justifiable or not,” he adds, “is a different question.”

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Author: Business News New Jersey