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I, over here in Evanston, fast-food is now up to $7 hr. You can make $10 maybe for managing. The best job in town for the avg Joe is at the dirty-book store for $9. The best paid folks work for the city/county/police depts. They and the holders of political office make an exorbitant paycheck compared to the populace!! It's not right. Again, the trades and trucking industries pay more. You can work day-labor thru SOS and maybe make over $10hr. A Safety Mgr at the gas-plants,etc can make over $20. There are not all that many jobs available in any one field. Most folks that really want to make it are working 2 jobs - but it's not easy to find two jobs in most areas. You can make it here - folks are struggling all over America. I made a lot of money until Mr Reagan became prez. I was making 52K a yr for several years - in less than 15 mos, I was down to 11K. Better than what he did to the Air-Traffic-Controllers though - they all went to work for me!
just check the state job services website to get an idea of wages.there likely arent many fast food jobs listed there[though ive never looked]but it will give you a good indication of what a given field is paying,and how much it varies in different regions of the state.how many listings there are for a given job will also show you how great the need is in that area.wyoming has a state website to which you can link to the job bank and also access most of the newspapers in the state and read their classifieds online
I, over here in Evanston, fast-food is now up to $7 hr. You can make $10 maybe for managing. The best job in town for the avg Joe is at the dirty-book store for $9. The best paid folks work for the city/county/police depts. They and the holders of political office make an exorbitant paycheck compared to the populace!! It's not right. Again, the trades and trucking industries pay more. You can work day-labor thru SOS and maybe make over $10hr. A Safety Mgr at the gas-plants,etc can make over $20. There are not all that many jobs available in any one field. Most folks that really want to make it are working 2 jobs - but it's not easy to find two jobs in most areas. You can make it here - folks are struggling all over America. I made a lot of money until Mr Reagan became prez. I was making 52K a yr for several years - in less than 15 mos, I was down to 11K. Better than what he did to the Air-Traffic-Controllers though - they all went to work for me!
Wow - why are the wages in Evanston so low? My kids make more than $10/hr working part-time jobs after school and on weekends. We don't live in a boom area either. There are help-wanted signs up all over town. Most restaurants and hotels are looking for people, as well as the grocery stores, gas stations.
Wyoming wages, for the most part, are rather low in comparison to the costs of living here. The unpaid "benefit" is the lifestyle and ready access to wide areas of good hunting, fishing, and wilderness land for outdoor recreation with low taxes (and attendant low level of government services).
In the energy boom town areas, prices for housing and land have greatly outstripped the wage base. Rentals or leased housing is not easily available.
In resort/tourism areas, housing and land today is beyond the reach of any except wealthy people, whose wealth typically comes from outside of the area.
There are folks who own a lot of Wyoming land as a result of inheiritance from homesteaders or early land owners. Most of those early large landowners themselves came from exceptional wealth from out of the area.
I know that Halliburton and others fly in crews and house them at great expense, giving them a good wage (mid $20/hour) and per diems. But those jobs are historically cyclical, and many people live far away from their job sites in otherwise undesirable remote areas. They company bus or car pool a lot of hours a day to get to/from work.
Places like Cheyenne have a very low hourly wage base due to a large retired military population. Those folks don't depend upon a job for their living, so they're willing to work for low wages. Lowe's opened up a warehouse with a few managerial well paid jobs, the rest were $9.00/hour with few benefits. Sierra trading post the same. WalMart's opening up a new warehouse, with base wages advertised in the $13.00 hour range. Just tells you that the functional unemployment rate here is getting very low ... if you can show up to work and work, you can get hired today.
Trades pay very low in Wyoming. I know of mechanics flat-rating at dealerships for around $15.00/hour, while just down the road on the I-25 corridor, diesel truck shops are advertising for journeymen mechanics at $33.00 hour + benefits. My flat-rating tech friends in Denver dealerships bring home $80,000+ per year (I paid $25/hour for car techs in the early 1990's in Denver and was a just barely competitive employer with a 40 hour guaranteed workweek). Electricians here make under $20 hour, while Colorado front range licensed journeyman get in the $30 range. Same for plumbers, carpenters, etc.
Fast-food hourly pay runs $8-9.00/hour. Seasoned managers might make $mid 30's to 40K, while the same job in Denver might pay as much as close to 6 figures.
Government jobs, especially managerial jobs, tend to pay rates that are for like jobs in other areas of the country to attract and retain "qualified" workers. So the pay scale is way out of reason compared to the rest of the staffing, especially the private sector. I have a neighbor who is a federal employee, gets $26 hour for guard service at the courthouse. His wife gets a comparable salary ($50K) for a clerk's job in the fed center, she's hoping to be promoted to office manager when her boss retires soon ($78K/year + benefits).
My wife's boss (now retiring) received $80,000 year for managing a county office branch with 5 degreed employees earning $12.00/hr; his requirement was a master's degree in a related field. I know he worked only 20 hours per week for the last 6 years and had 5 weeks paid vacation, too. I don't know of too many private sector jobs that could afford his level of incompetence or lack of performance, but he's being lauded as a great loss to the county in his retirement. The big deal being that he'd given the county 28years of service .... My wife's more qualified to run the office and do his job, but she only has a BA; she's been doing his job when he wasn't available (which was most of the time) for years.
wages can vary a lot from one city or region in wyoming to another.when i was an autobody painter in gillette 10 years ago i made a lot more per flatrate hour then i had near washington dc.at the time gillette was in a bust cycle so the cost of housing there was very cheap so i had the best of both worlds,good wages and cheap housing.people i met who worked in denver,co or billings,mt made a lot less for the same job even though they lived in much bigger areas.at the time there werent many good jobs available though.now there are plenty of goodjobs but the cost of housing is as high or higher then many large cities.the se and nw parts of the state in general have never had as many good paying jobs as the ne and sw parts of the state have.of course only what you are able and/or willing to do is going to determine what you'll make even in the boom areas.i doubt many people are going to relocate to wyoming just to work at a walmart.you arent going to get rich working at mcdonalds anywhere in the country.i think the 'unpaid benefits'sunsprit discussed are the best reasons for living in wyoming,and if you can earn enough to eat,put a roof over your head,and buy some guns and gear,then you're doing allright.
Here in Casper McDonald's is advertising $7.75/hr. Other fast food places are paying over $10/hr for managers. Office type jobs are generally $9-10/hr. I work at OfficeMax call center and make just under $10 for a new hire. Raises will probably be forthcoming. Starting salary for teachers is going up to $40K/yr in the next couple years. So to me the wages aren't very low.
My bet is that the above poster has been around for long enough to have good housing at a pre-boom low price.
I know that when I earned $10 hr (35 years ago), it was a struggle to afford a two bedroom/one bath brick $18,000 house in a 2-35 program neighborhood, a $3,500 new car, food, insurance (car and health), property taxes, license fees, clothes, and a few modest items for pleasure (a nice bicycle, and a 250cc motorcycle). Married, and shortly thereafter with two kids, $10/hr didn't meet survival level living. I was thrilled to improve my job skills and get up to $16/hr the next year with a new employer.
Ultimately, I had to go into business (auto repair) to slowly work up to high 5 figures/year income. Bought and re-sold fix-up houses every couple of years for 25 years to capture the appreciation and equity which has now bought my little Wyoming ranch.
Fast forward to today, and I don't believe there's too many $30,000 houses and $3,500 cars available. Let alone affordable health insurance, or modest food costs per month.
So, where is $10/hour, or for that matter, a $40K per year salary, going to put you? If you're living in 1970, you're doing fine. If you're living in 2007, and just now moving to Wyoming, I think you'd have a problem.
My husband just got a job as a Heating and Air Conditioning Service Tech for 17.00 an hour with a few years of experience in Sheridan.. The company hiring him, hires at 17-22 an hour, depending on experience and will train and hire on with no experience.
I have searched the job bank, and I put starting wage at 14.50 an hour, and I saw several pages of jobs.. ?
I guess it just depends on the area you live in.
Ya know what is sad, we live in Oregon and dh will get a 4 dollar raise by moving to Wy?
The housing is a little bit harder to find...
Overall I know that Wy is in better shape than OR, the cost of living lower in some aspects..
Just imagine where I live now, there are jobs out there 8 or 9 dollars an hour, with high taxes, high cost of living and gas, and houses starting at 160,000 and going up..
My dad works in the employment department here in OR and said they are prediciting another 2000 jobs to be cut. while the government jobs increase at least 7% a year... and employers complain because the can't find people to work for 8 or 9 dollars an hour to my dad's department, when no one can live on that here...
I would go to the worksource wyoming website.. it is very helpful and you can search statewide for jobs..
My bet is that the above poster has been around for long enough to have good housing at a pre-boom low price.
I know that when I earned $10 hr (35 years ago), it was a struggle to afford a two bedroom/one bath brick $18,000 house in a 2-35 program neighborhood, a $3,500 new car, food, insurance (car and health), property taxes, license fees, clothes, and a few modest items for pleasure (a nice bicycle, and a 250cc motorcycle). Married, and shortly thereafter with two kids, $10/hr didn't meet survival level living. I was thrilled to improve my job skills and get up to $16/hr the next year with a new employer.
Ultimately, I had to go into business (auto repair) to slowly work up to high 5 figures/year income. Bought and re-sold fix-up houses every couple of years for 25 years to capture the appreciation and equity which has now bought my little Wyoming ranch.
Fast forward to today, and I don't believe there's too many $30,000 houses and $3,500 cars available. Let alone affordable health insurance, or modest food costs per month.
So, where is $10/hour, or for that matter, a $40K per year salary, going to put you? If you're living in 1970, you're doing fine. If you're living in 2007, and just now moving to Wyoming, I think you'd have a problem.
If you mean me as the above poster, no. I just moved here in September. We're paying $100 less for rent than we did on a similar sized 2 bd apt in Michigan. Though we only have one car (one didn't survive the move, don't ask) and both our jobs are on the other side of town. Our gas costs were minimal in MI because we lived close to where we both worked and barely drove.
Together we both make just over $30,000/yr, but my kids are grown and he just got his student loans refinanced so he's paying half as much as he did before. I work part time, btw, but have no debts. We plan on moving in the spring so we're closer to work, saving on gas probably, but maybe paying a little more for rent.
I had worked in Chicago, Beantown, and New York, before going to Wyoming for the first time, and even I was shocked at how high the prices were, in comparison to the wages being paid. I finally figured out that it was due to the relative scarcity of population per square mile. What I'm trying to say is that $10/hr is essentially meaningless, unless you understand that its being paid in an area that also has $3.20/gal gas, and five bucks for a burger that costs two bucks in Lansing (MI). I always have found that Wyo pays less, in relation to the actual cost of living, than states such as Illinois, Michigan, or Ohio. call it 'food' for thought.
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Evanston wages
