Low wages may be keeping area employers from recruiting highly-skilled workers, according to the Wichita State University Center for Economic Development and Business Research.
Wages in Harvey County are lower than other area counties, as well as the state average.
A worker in Harvey County made $36,918 on average in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is 18 percent lower than the state average of $45,117.
In Sedgwick County, the wages are even higher. In 2017, the average annual wage for a worker in Sedgwick County was $46,392 — 26 percent higher than Harvey County.
Jeremy Hill, Director of the Wichita State University Center for Economic Development and Business Research, said it poses a problem for Harvey County because it draws mostly from the same labor pool as Sedgwick County.
Hill’s numbers show that the problem is most magnified in the manufacturing industry, which is Harvey County’s largest private industry by a wide margin. The average manufacturing worker in Harvey County made $48,579 in 2017. While that is higher than the averages among other industries, it is still much lower than Sedgwick County.
Sedgwick County manufacturing workers made an average of $69,905 per year – or some 44 percent more than in Harvey County.
That may not be the case for much longer, however.
Over the last decade, wages in Harvey County have grown more than twice as fast as Sedgwick County.
(Read more: Newton Now)