One of San Diego’s biggest job clusters lost more than 20,000 jobs between 1990 and 1998, but another cluster showed a net gain of more than 30,000 jobs during the same time, according to a study done by the San Diego Association of Governments.
The losing cluster, as anyone who was around in the early 1990s recalls, was defense and transportation manufacturing, a sector that once defined this region and accounted for a huge chunk of the area’s high-paying jobs. Those jobs evaporated when large defense contractors such as General Dynamics, Hughes Electronics, and Lockheed-Martin departed after the federal defense budget was slashed.
While aerospace and defense suffered, a cluster identified as business services generated the greatest number of new jobs for the period, increasing from about 48,159 to 78,792 jobs, a jump of 64 percent. The sector includes professional business services such as legal, accounting and consulting services, but the bulk of the new jobs came from a large spike in temporary employment firms.
Marney Cox, the Sandag economist who headed the study, said by learning more about the region’s clusters, elected officials and policy-makers can better understand where growth or loss is happening. Clusters are defined as groups of interrelated sectors that drive profits in a region primarily through the export of goods and services.
By having data on clusters, decision-makers are better able to guide panded by 206 percent to 6,195 employees, most of whom were employed in golf manufacturing. That number likely decreased in recent years as the industry underwent consolidation.
The next largest percent gainers were biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, which grew 104 percent to about 23,000 employees; and software, which grew 101 percent to 17,700 employees.
Indicative of the growth in business services is the experience of AppleOne, a temp staffing company with 10 offices in the county.
“Last year was our best year ever (in terms of revenues) but this year is even better,” said Eve Nasby, AppleOne’s regional manager.
Nasby said staffing companies benefited from a trend for companies to downsize and then hire temporary workers on an as-needed basis, rather filling those positions on a permanent basis.
Companies began hiring temporary workers for not only lower-skilled office positions but for all types of jobs, including technical and managerial positions.
“A lot of organizations couldn’t find the employees they needed fast enough, and towards the end of the 1990s, there was an extreme shortage so they came to rely more on the temporary services,” said Debbie Dunn, regional managing director for the Eastridge Group.
Dunn said since the early 1990s, Eastridge local offices, which grew from one to four branches, saw business increase by more than 500 percent.
The Sandag study on clusters also covered wage data showing some clusters gaining, while some, including business services, actually declining in average wages.
The highest-paying average wages were in software and computer services, where the average was $63,657 as of 1998. Next highest were biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, $55,974; and computer and electronics manufacturing, $54,974.
The largest gain over the period was in recreational goods manufacturing, where wages increased 36 percent to $36,340. Average wages declined by 5 percent in medical services to $38,015, and by 2 percent in business services to $30,884.
Cox said when an update of the study is completed, the communications cluster will show the biggest gain in the average wage, bringing that figure to more than $100,000. “It’s because of all those stock options that were paid out during that time,” he said.
A copy of the cluster study is available on the Sandag Web site at (www.sandag.org), or by calling the organization.
