New York Opportunity and Income New York Career Guidance Babel's Secret New York Work and Welfare Minorities Higher Education This Was New York: The Nation's Capital in 1789 Points of Interest Centers Broadway and the Road Midtown The Metropolitian Museum of Art The New York Botanical Garden Central Park Brooklyn Points of Interest New York Aquarium The City's Libraries History The Founding The American City The City of Five Boroughs Immigration	New York Opportunity and Income Ultimately, a worker's question is: Can a living be made in New York City, and, if so, how? Answers to this question, of course, are relative. Compared with 31 of the world's largest cities, New York salaries are the highest. While automobiles, gasoline, and taxes are relatively cheap, all other consumer goods and services are among the most expensive, including astronomical rents for standard housing, which lead the way. Furthermore, the patchwork of available medical care services and payment methods never equals the coverage enjoyed by a citizen of, for example, Copenhagen, where all medical and dental services, including prescriptions, are provided without direct cost to the consumer. As a matter of policy, the United States has been reluctant to tamper with market mechanisms; and even with the expansion of social security, welfare, and health schemes, families require relatively high cash earnings to maintain themselves. This usually means some form of occupational or organizational attachment that affords steady work at adequate wages and minimum protection against such hazards as unemployment, sickness, or old age. In a segmented labor market, not all workers achieve establishment. This is the phenomenon involved in concepts that dichotomize the labor market into such categories as primary and secondary, preferred and transient, or central and peripheral. The attributes of the job are critical for achieving work establishment. Very different kinds of work lend themselves to this degree of modest success, which in effect gives the worker a kind of property right in his job and keeps other possible claimants out. Cutting across the industrial distribution, to which we will return below, is a top stratum of workers whose market protection is in the form of distinct occupational activities usually requiting extended preemployment training and specific credentials in the form of degrees and licenses. These workers are included in the census category, "professional, technical and kindred," which aggregates such disparate occupations as physician, entertainer, and engineering technician. The category as a whole constitutes 14 percent of New York City's total employment, about the same as the national proportion, but the city has a disproportionate share of the higher-paid professionals. The outlook for professional and technical employment in New York City is mixed. On the one hand, the city's preeminence in producer services and in finance means that certain kinds of top professional jobs will continue to be important in the city's manpower picture. Many of these are protected not only by the level of credentials required but also by other kinds of control over the terms and conditions of employment. Physicians, dentists, lawyers, accountants, architects, and engineers all require some form of state license to practice, and to varying degrees they control the supply of the profession through their influence on training institutions and curricula. Public school teachers not only require licensing, but also have the added protections of civil service and a strong union. The same may be said of other professionals working for government in New York City. These shelters will probably continue to yield high earnings for those who are employed, but, in some occupations, employment will not be as readily available in the seventies as in the sixties because of the pressure of increased supplies of well-educated workers. This effect is already apparent, most clearly among teachers. New York City teachers, who enjoy a high pay scale and other benefits, will doubtless continue to do so, but their ranks will not grow very much in the short run because of both demographic shifts in the school-age population and stringencies in the city budget. At the other extreme, the income of physicians will probably continue to increase as long as the profession is successful in limiting supply and in influencing the size of third-party payments in such schemes as Medicaid and Medicare. In addition to the professionals, New York City has a sizable cohort of salaried managers. It is difficult to estimate their number, but the relative magnitude of high-salaried jobs in the city may be inferred from the proportion of exempt workers in various industries and their earnings. These workers by definition include salaried professionals, executives, administrators, and outside salesmen, who are ineligible for overtime pay and other benefits according to the federal and state minimum wage laws. In New York City, there seems to be cause for concern about the continued existence of many small establishments in trade and service. Store rents have risen to levels that make continued operation uneconomic. Competition from larger units, undercapitalization, and managerial inadequacy probably have contributed to the problems of small business, but turnover is also adversely affected by the combination of inflation and recession that has slowed the rest of the economy in the recent past. One attribute of preferred employment that is usually taken for granted is its continuity. Jobs of the kind discussed above are structured in the expectation of full-time, year-round activity which, ceteris paribus, implies higher annual earnings than a parttime or intermittent work schedule. Data based on the Social Security Administration continuous work history file give a crude estimate of employment stability. Like the rest of the nation, New York generates a number of jobs in product markets with fluctuating demands -- jobs that are best filled, from the employer's point of view, with a flexible work force. According to the product market, workers have more or less opportunity to stabilize the terms and conditions of employment or to bargain for a level of earnings that obviates some of the disadvantages of intermittency. Home