PHOENIX — The insurance site smartestdollar.com put out a list of cities with the largest pay gap between employees and managers. The bottom line: wage gaps in Arizona metro areas are better than most.
The median annual salary for an employee in Arizona is $44,000, according to their data.
Management jobs meanwhile command a median take-home amount of $77,000, making a gap of 42.9% between management-level jobs and those considered non-supervisory.
This is not as pronounced as in Texas and California, the states with the highest gaps between managers and employees. In Texas, the median annual wage for management-level employees was double that of non-management.
Of the 256 metro areas of varying sizes analyzed, most Arizona cities were found at the bottom where the gap between manager and employee pay was smaller. The Lake Havasu-Kingman area had the largest gap of all Arizona metros at 49%, ranking 34th.
Rankings for other cities in the state drop off considerably from there with Yuma, Phoenix, and Tucson all ranking between 101 and 181. Flagstaff has one of the smallest wage gaps of any city, ranking in the bottom 20 of the list with an employer/manager wage gap of 29%.
The report also highlighted the gaps in worker productivity compared to earnings growth since 1979. They used data from the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank generally considered to be left-leaning, showing the cumulative change for non-management earnings was in line with the Labor Department’s index on worker productivity from 1948 to 1979, with both metrics doubling during that time period.
In the decades that followed the measures split off from one another. Productivity rose 64.6% from 1980 to 2021 while earnings for non-management level jobs only increase 17%. This means worker productivity since 1980 effectively increased by a factor of 3.7 compared to an increase in wages.
The best-paid non-management jobs were mostly in the tech and finance sectors but were topped by the legal profession. Manager-level professionals with the highest pay were listed as doctors, dentists, and chief executives.
