Report: More Texans are working, but median wage is slipping

There's nothing like a story about declining wages for a midweek pick-me-up, is there? In that spirit, Houstonist brings you the news that, though Texas has had more job growth than the national average in the last few years, our median income is dropping. In fact, there's been a 6.2 percent drop in the median wage in Texas since 2002, and young and black workers are being hit particularly hard.

The information comes from the Center for Public Policy Priorities, an Austin think tank that releases reports on the Texas economy near Labor Day each year. According to the CPPP, the biggest job gains in Texas since 2000 have been in the education and health services field, which showed a 15.3 percent growth. Leisure and hospitality ranked No. 2 (9.8 percent growth), followed by government (7.2 percent) and financial activities (6.8 percent). The good news overall is that the state's overall job growth since 2000 has been 5.4 percent, significantly more than the national average of 3.4 percent; Texas' unemployment rate has dropped in the last three years, too, to 5.2 percent from 6.8 percent.

The bad news is that slump in real median income, along with some other statistics about the Texas workforce — for example, 47 percent of workers here had no formal education past high school (according to the Census Bureau, only 23.2 percent of Texans over age 25 had bachelor's degrees or higher in 2000). Texas' median wage continues to lag behind the national average, and the state's health coverage is also declining.

Among the industries showing job declines in the last few years are manufacturing (down 18.9 percent) and IT (down 21.7 percent) — caused in part by outsourcing of jobs and the bursting of the tech bubble a few years back.