And The Average Salary In Pharma Is…

With the big annual BIO convention under way this week, the latest effort to quantify the progress being made by the biopharma sector shows that job growth in the pharma world is under pressure, but wages, on average, are holding their own.

Overall, the bioscience sector paid average annual wages of $77,595 in 2008, up from $70,959 in 2006. On average, bioscience jobs paid $32,366 more than the average annual wage of the total US private sector, which was $45,229 in 2008. Bioscience wages also are outpacing the national private sector in growth. Since 2001, real earnings adjusted for inflation rose by 10.1 percent, compared with 3.2 percent for the US private sector. The average wage in the pharma sector, specifically, was $93,378, according to the Battelle Institute report (see here).

However, there were substantial job losses (defined as 1,000 or more) in pharma in Michigan, Illinois, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, where most of these most likely can be attributed to Pfizer’s ongoing consolidation and, more recently, its acquistion of Wyeth. Conversely, there were substantial gains (1,000 or more jobs added) in Florida, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Texas, Delaware and Kansas.

The pharma sector began the recent recession by shedding 2.3 percent of its employment base,
which totaled nearly 312,000 by 2008 and spanned about 2,800 individual business establishments. During much of the economic expansion of the past decade, employment remained relatively flat,
though it grew in both 2006 and 2007. Its rate of job loss was greater than that for the overall U.S. private sector in 2008, which declined by just 0.7 percent iin the first year of the recession. As the only of the four bioscience subsectors to lose jobs in 2008, pharma’s share of national bioscience employment declined from 24 percent in 2006 to 22 percent in 2008.

Meanwhile, there’s been what Battelle calls “rapid national growth” among firms in research, testing, and medical laboratories and this is now geographically widespread, with 48 states and Puerto Rico adding some level of jobs in the subsector since 2001. Among these growth states are an impressive 27 states and Puerto Rico that have grown their job base by 1,000 jobs or more.