COMPENSATION - Wage gap in state widens, study says

The California Budget Project said in the report, to be released today, that wages for people toiling at the bottom of the pay range dropped 7.2% over the 27 years studied, while Californians at the other end of the range saw their pay rise 18.4%.

Most of the jobs that will be added to the economy well into the next decade probably will pay either quite well or relatively little, the report said, at either about $83,000 a year or $21,000 a year.

The findings underscore "the extent to which inequality in California exists," said Jean Ross, executive director of the Budget Project, which focuses its research on matters that affect low- and middle-income households. "A significant fraction of the California workforce is falling behind."

Most of the new jobs that have been generated in recent years have been for engineers, executives, lawyers and scientists at the highest tier -- paying more than $22 an hour in 2006 dollars -- and for store clerks, cashiers, nurses' aides and farmworkers at the lowest tier, paying less than $11 an hour, the report said.

In fact, from 1999 to 2005, according to the report, 43% of new jobs paid less than $11 an hour.

Jobs have been relatively scarce for factory workers, bookkeepers, secretaries and other middle-level earners, the report said. Many of those kinds of positions were lost when 464,700 manufacturing jobs in the state disappeared from 1990 to 2006, accelerating a shift to a more service-sector job economy. The contraction of the aerospace industry in the early 1990s cut deeply into local payrolls.

"It concerns everybody when you're living in a society that is increasingly bifurcated, and that's definitely true of Southern California," said Lisa Grobar, a Cal State Long Beach economist.

But Sung Won Sohn, an economist and chief executive of Hanmi Bank in Los Angeles, cautioned against drawing "alarming conclusions." Although there may be an expanding wage gulf, he said, "net worth has gone up significantly even for people at the low end of the income spectrum," because homeowners have seen the value of their houses increase.