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Rhode Island news
2.25.2001 00:13
The vanishing border
Lured by pay, opportunity, some 66,000 Rhode Islanders travel daily to jobs in the Bay State
By ARIEL SABAR and SCOTT MACKAY
Journal Staff Writers
PROVIDENCE -- Louis C. Yeostros is not your typical
Boston commuter. He is not a mutual-fund manager or an Internet wunderkind. He
does not work for Harvard.
But here he is every weekday morning, driving from Cranston to Providence, taking an hour-long train to Boston's Back Bay station, and then catching a subway to his job as an office temporary worker.
Yeostros, 38, who has a master's degree, had been earning $12 to $13 an hour in Rhode Island until he discovered that he could make twice as much in Boston. He is temping now at Boston Children's Hospital, as a grants administrator. He makes $25 an hour.
"I've interviewed in Rhode Island," he says, "and the salaries are just so much lower that it's just not worth it."
More Rhode Island residents than ever before are working in Massachusetts -- lured by better pay, dream jobs, and an economy that no longer stops at state lines. The 9-to-5 exodus can be seen in the soaring traffic on the interstates into Massachusetts and on the commuter trains that in just the last few years have become standing-room-only.
Every weekday, as many as one out of seven employed Rhode Island residents -- enough to populate Pawtucket -- commute to the Bay State. And the numbers are growing.
In 1998, according to the most recent tax records, more than 66,000 Rhode Islanders reported that they had earned a salary or wages in Massachusetts. That's nearly 18,000 more than just five years earlier.
To put it another way: Rhode Island residents earned $2.1 billion in Massachusetts in 1998 -- $762 million more than they had in 1993.
RHODE ISLANDERS have always traveled to blue-collar jobs in nearby Attleboro and Fall River. But now, more than ever, they are forsaking the short hops that characterize life in Rhode Island for the hauls of an hour or more to Greater Boston.
Elsewhere in the country, such commutes are second nature. But here in the smallest state -- a parochial place, where generations have walked from triple-decker to red-brick factory -- the trend toward long commutes is a remarkable cultural shift.
It is, on one level, a simple reflection of the acceleration of travel and communication since the horse and buggy. But it's also evidence of a Massachusetts economic engine that has come to dwarf Rhode Island's.
Over the past two decades, Greater Boston's booming finance and high-technology industries -- and their big-city salaries -- have proved a magnet for people from New Hampshire to Rhode Island's South County. Increased train service has only strengthened the pull.
Commuting now are not just stockbrokers and bio-technology executives, but high school teachers, lawyers, government workers, office temps, and freelance graphic designers.
The trend has in some ways cast Rhode Island in the role of such places as Connecticut's Fairfield County, outside New York City, and Virginia's Fairfax County, outside Washington, D.C.: the bedroom to a world-class city.
"ARE YOU NUTS?"
That's what Robert C. Persson Jr. heard when he told his parents and friends that he was leaving his computer-sales job in Warwick for work in the Boston area.
Persson also had doubts about giving up a 10-minute drive to work. But they didn't last long. He now earns more than $120,000 a year as a consulting computer-network engineer for such companies as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and EMC Corp. That's about double what he has been offered for similar work in Rhode Island.
Still, Persson, 30, who rents an apartment in Cranston's Knightsville section, would prefer to work in his home state, where he relishes the short drives to parks, beaches and his parents' house.
He says that the r sum he's posted on job-search Web sites such as Monster.com and Net-temps.com lists Rhode Island as his first choice for a job. But in two years, he says, he has gotten some 200 calls from Massachusetts -- and just 3 from Rhode Island.
"The more senior-level positions don't seem to exist in Rhode Island," he says. "And when they do come into play, they pay between $20,000 to $25,000 less a year."
Persson has grown so frustrated with his fruitless Rhode Island job search that he is given to such pronouncements as "It's a state where people live but don't work."
For Claudia Iannuccilli, 41, a fulfilling job just doesn't exist here. The East Greenwich resident works as an assistant conservator for textiles and costumes at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
"I have a fabulous job, and I can't do it in Rhode Island," she says. "There's not a full-time textile-conservation job anywhere in Rhode Island."
Even so, many commuters torture themselves over the your-money-or-your-life tradeoff that pits job against family.
"They struggle with 'What does this mean for my quality of life if I commute three hours a day?' " says Mary K. Morse, a vice president of the Travis & Company headhunting firm, which recruits executives for technology and biomedical companies in southern New England.
"Their first choice would be to find the same opportunity right here," she says. "But many people are willing to make the sacrifice for the right job. The reality is, if they are going to open their options, they often have to look at Massachusetts."
She should know. Morse worked in Massachusetts for several years before realizing that she could do her job at home, in Barrington.
SOME EXPERTS say that Rhode Island will never be in the same league as Massachusetts, home to America's seventh-largest metropolitan area and to one of the nation's premier high-tech nodes: Routes 128 and 495. Boston, these people say, will always have the Red Sox and the Bruins, while Rhode Island makes do with the Paw Sox and the P-Bruins.
"We have the talent, but not the jobs," says Leonard P. Lardaro, an economist at the University of Rhode Island who has studied what he has termed the out-of-state job gap. "Rhode Island has redefined brain drain as 9-to-5."
Other experts take a rosier view. They say that the growing number of trains between the two states and a younger, more mobile work force willing to commute long distances and hopscotch from job to job have made the states' economies indistinguishable. And before long, they predict, high-paying New Economy jobs will spread to Rhode Island, as Massachusetts becomes a victim of its own success and workers flee south for less traffic and a better quality of life.
"We're taking advantage of Boston's strengths and weaknesses," says Christopher Bergstrom, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council. "Its strength is it's a powerhouse of innovation. Its weakness is it's musclebound: it's running out of people and running out of space."
There are already signs that Rhode Island is catching some of the Massachusetts spillover. Yet the big draw now is not jobs, but lifestyle. Rhode Island's small scale and reasonable real-estate prices figure prominently in the sales pitch of local job recruiters and economic boosters.
Fred M. Kuhr, 33, an editor at In Newsweekly, a Boston-based gay-and-lesbian regional newspaper, left his one-bedroom Back Bay apartment a year and a half ago, when the rent went from $1,075 to $1,500.
He and his partner, Kip Roberson, the public library director in Sharon, Mass., looked for a more affordable place in the Boston suburbs of Braintree and Quincy. But they found those communities boring, and decided instead on Providence. So they found a one-bedroom condominium on Benefit Street and bought it for $100,000 -- approximately a third of what a similar place would have cost in Boston.
"Providence offers all the good things you want from a city, with very few of the bad things," says Kuhr, who walks to the Providence station each morning to take the train to Boston. "You don't have the parking problems, congestion . . . Providence is much more livable."
Half of the eight units in his building house people with jobs in Boston, including an interior designer, a marketer, and an Internet worker.
Even Internet discussion groups have taken up the Providence-Boston topic. In one group, on "Goth" fashion, a woman recently complained about Boston's "stratospherically expensive" rents -- to which another group member responded:
Providence & the surrounding areas have some charm & lots of artsy types who are not of the trust-fund variety (the kind Boston teems with), it's tiny and easy to get around, and it's not much more difficult or timeconsuming to get to Boston than it would be if you lived in [Boston's] outer suburbs.
The author signed off with:
In the sticks, and glad for it.
THE LINES between the two states have always been somewhat arbitrary. No Rocky Mountain range or Mississippi River separates them.
Roger Williams did cross water from Massachusetts to found Providence, but the Seekonk River is not the states' boundary. And over the centuries, land has even shifted between Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
What has always separated the two New England states is culture -- Rhode Islanders' pungent accent and coffee-milk addiction being just two obvious examples.
"There is still a cultural border," says Joel Garreau, author of the book on suburban sprawl Edge City . "It seems there is something different in Seekonk."
Whenever the Pawtucket native sees the TV show Providence , he smiles. "They haven't got the accent right at all. And they don't get the humor -- self-deprecating and lightning-fast."
These cultural differences go back 350 years.
Fleeing the Massachusetts Puritans, Roger Williams embodied the independence of Rhode Islanders -- who later distinguished themselves by being the last of the 13 Colonies to ratify the Constitution.
And Rhode Island always had its distinct sources of wealth, from the South County plantations to the slave and East Indian trades to the Industrial Revolution -- born, on this continent, in Pawtucket.
By 1900, Rhode Island was the Silicon Valley of its day: a high-tech center that created the state-of-the-art machines that churned out the textiles and other goods that made Providence the richest city in America.
But then things changed. Seeking cheap labor, the factories increasingly moved South and, finally, overseas.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts also grew rich on the Industrial Revolution. But when its factories closed, that state found its way out of the decline through its prestigious research universities, which spawned the high-tech companies that define its economy today.
Moreover, Boston has always been New England's banking hub. Now, with the decade's growth in the stock market, the city has raised its profile as a global manager of money.
THE MASSACHUSETTS Bay Transportation Authority started commuter train service between Boston and Providence in 1988, and last summer it increased the daily round trips from five to eight. The number of riders has gone up by a third, to more than 800 each day.
When the MBTA train was late getting into Providence the other night, a passenger snorted: "We could always get work in Rhode Island -- right?"
The other passengers chuckled, recalls Louis Yeostros, the temp worker who commutes to Boston. "The sense was, You don't really have a choice -- not if you want to get paid well."
In 1999, according to the two states' labor departments, the average pay for software and communications work in Rhode Island was about $57,000, while in Massachusetts it was about $74,000. For finance and insurance jobs, in Rhode Island it was $45,000, versus Massachusetts's $72,000.
And that leaves aside the question of job opportunities.
Government figures show that the region's New Economy jobs are disproportionately concentrated in Massachusetts. Rhode Island is home to about 12 percent of all jobs in the "Greater Boston Metro" region -- which stretches from Rhode Island's South County to southern New Hampshire. Nonetheless, Rhode Island has only 6 percent of the jobs in finance, information, medical technology, electronics, and high technology.
But recently, those jobs have been inching closer to Rhode Island as Massachusetts companies seek less congestion, cheaper real estate, and access to new labor markets.
In 1999, EMC Corp., one of the country's leading makers of computer-data-storage systems, opened its largest factory, in Franklin, Mass. -- just 10 minutes from Woonsocket. The company now employs 600 Rhode Island residents, and by the end of the year plans to add 2,300 jobs at its facilities near the state line.
"You look at where some of the most significant growth in Massachusetts on [Route] 495 has been, and it's far south of the Massachusetts Turnpike," says Thomas E. Hubbard, vice president of the Massachustts Technology Collaborative, which promotes economic growth. "It's really in an area that has traditionally drawn workers out of Rhode Island."
The numbers seem to prove it.
In 1980, about 24,800 Rhode Island residents -- or about 6 percent of all employed residents -- worked in Massachusetts. By 1990, that number had soared to 46,400, or about 10 percent of all employed residents.
Comparable figures for 2000 won't be known until next year, when the U.S. Census Bureau releases them. But figures from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue show that from 1993 to 1998, the number of Rhode Islanders reporting a salary or wages in the Bay State grew from 48,290 to 66,158 -- from one out of 10 employed Ocean State residents to one out of seven.
ACUTELY AWARE of this labor drain, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation has launched a web-site campaign called mass-exodus.com to entice southward-looking Massachusetts companies to actually cross the Rhode Island border.
The next phase of the EDC's campaign, starting next month, takes aim at Rhode Islanders who commute to Boston. Under the direction of the Providence ad firm Duffy & Shanley, the EDC staff will dress up as train conductors and hand out "schedules" that list such "stops" as:
Wait in subzero temps.
Can't get a seat.
Guy spills coffee on you.
Woman next to you won't shut up.
"When was the last time you had a bowl of cereal with your kid?" asks the back of schedule.
The EDC is calling its latest effort a "guerrilla marketing program" and hopes to sell commuters on the idea that Rhode Island is a "hot technology center."
Indeed, the state has succeeded recently in attracting a few small technology companies to locate here. And the number of Bay State residents commuting to Rhode Island is also increasing slightly. According to the Rhode Island Division of Taxation, about 41,300 Bay Staters reported earning at least some work or business income here in 1999, up from 38,000 in 1997.
But that's still about 40 percent fewer than the number of Rhode Islanders reporting income in Massachusetts. And some of those Rhode Islanders are skeptical that a publicity campaign could persuade thousands of Ocean State residents to take jobs closer to home.
"You don't all of a sudden turn into a hotbed of biotech and job creation in health care and technology," says William D. Vanech, 57, an East Side resident.
He left his job in Rhode Island in 1994 when Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Boston offered him a significant pay increase. He is now a senior vice president, managing money for wealthy families and foundations; he says there are simply more of both in Boston.
"If I didn't have to commute," he says, "I wouldn't. The reason I do commute is because of opportunities that are not available to me in Rhode Island."
OTHERS MAY BE more receptive to the local anti-commuting campaign.
Every weekday, Thomas A. Padula, 47, takes car and train for a journey of more than two hours from South County's Hopkinton to Boston. A construction manager at an international engineering firm, he was offered a substantial raise to make this commute after the firm closed its Warwick office, a decade ago.
He wakes up at 3:15 a.m. to catch the 4:36 Amtrak train from Kingston, which pulls into Boston at about 6:45. He returns home at about 7 p.m. Three hours later he's in bed, and the cycle resumes.
"In that three hours," he says, "that's your time to have dinner, take a shower, unwind, and say hello to your family. You're constantly tired. It's not great for your home life."
Claudia Iannuccilli, the East Greenwich woman who works at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, says that she, her husband, and their three teenagers make a point of gathering each night for dinner.
While others in East Greenwich might spend their annual vacation in some exotic land, Iannuccilli devotes half of her four weeks' off to such basic parental activities as teacher conferences, doctors' appointments, and music recitals.
Occasionally, she'll take half a day off simply to be a mom.
"Sometimes it means coming home early -- just so you can pick them up from school and give them cookies."
-- With reports from staff writer David Herzog.
The vanishing border
Lured by pay, opportunity, some 66,000 Rhode Islanders travel daily to jobs in the Bay State
 Learn more about commuting trends between Rhode Island and Massachusetts and read past stories related to Census 2000. |
By ARIEL SABAR and SCOTT MACKAY
Journal Staff Writers
But here he is every weekday morning, driving from Cranston to Providence, taking an hour-long train to Boston's Back Bay station, and then catching a subway to his job as an office temporary worker.
Yeostros, 38, who has a master's degree, had been earning $12 to $13 an hour in Rhode Island until he discovered that he could make twice as much in Boston. He is temping now at Boston Children's Hospital, as a grants administrator. He makes $25 an hour.
"I've interviewed in Rhode Island," he says, "and the salaries are just so much lower that it's just not worth it."
More Rhode Island residents than ever before are working in Massachusetts -- lured by better pay, dream jobs, and an economy that no longer stops at state lines. The 9-to-5 exodus can be seen in the soaring traffic on the interstates into Massachusetts and on the commuter trains that in just the last few years have become standing-room-only.
Every weekday, as many as one out of seven employed Rhode Island residents -- enough to populate Pawtucket -- commute to the Bay State. And the numbers are growing.
In 1998, according to the most recent tax records, more than 66,000 Rhode Islanders reported that they had earned a salary or wages in Massachusetts. That's nearly 18,000 more than just five years earlier.
To put it another way: Rhode Island residents earned $2.1 billion in Massachusetts in 1998 -- $762 million more than they had in 1993.
RHODE ISLANDERS have always traveled to blue-collar jobs in nearby Attleboro and Fall River. But now, more than ever, they are forsaking the short hops that characterize life in Rhode Island for the hauls of an hour or more to Greater Boston.
Elsewhere in the country, such commutes are second nature. But here in the smallest state -- a parochial place, where generations have walked from triple-decker to red-brick factory -- the trend toward long commutes is a remarkable cultural shift.
It is, on one level, a simple reflection of the acceleration of travel and communication since the horse and buggy. But it's also evidence of a Massachusetts economic engine that has come to dwarf Rhode Island's.
Over the past two decades, Greater Boston's booming finance and high-technology industries -- and their big-city salaries -- have proved a magnet for people from New Hampshire to Rhode Island's South County. Increased train service has only strengthened the pull.
Commuting now are not just stockbrokers and bio-technology executives, but high school teachers, lawyers, government workers, office temps, and freelance graphic designers.
The trend has in some ways cast Rhode Island in the role of such places as Connecticut's Fairfield County, outside New York City, and Virginia's Fairfax County, outside Washington, D.C.: the bedroom to a world-class city.
"ARE YOU NUTS?"
That's what Robert C. Persson Jr. heard when he told his parents and friends that he was leaving his computer-sales job in Warwick for work in the Boston area.
Persson also had doubts about giving up a 10-minute drive to work. But they didn't last long. He now earns more than $120,000 a year as a consulting computer-network engineer for such companies as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and EMC Corp. That's about double what he has been offered for similar work in Rhode Island.
Still, Persson, 30, who rents an apartment in Cranston's Knightsville section, would prefer to work in his home state, where he relishes the short drives to parks, beaches and his parents' house.
He says that the r sum he's posted on job-search Web sites such as Monster.com and Net-temps.com lists Rhode Island as his first choice for a job. But in two years, he says, he has gotten some 200 calls from Massachusetts -- and just 3 from Rhode Island.
"The more senior-level positions don't seem to exist in Rhode Island," he says. "And when they do come into play, they pay between $20,000 to $25,000 less a year."
Persson has grown so frustrated with his fruitless Rhode Island job search that he is given to such pronouncements as "It's a state where people live but don't work."
For Claudia Iannuccilli, 41, a fulfilling job just doesn't exist here. The East Greenwich resident works as an assistant conservator for textiles and costumes at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
"I have a fabulous job, and I can't do it in Rhode Island," she says. "There's not a full-time textile-conservation job anywhere in Rhode Island."
Even so, many commuters torture themselves over the your-money-or-your-life tradeoff that pits job against family.
"They struggle with 'What does this mean for my quality of life if I commute three hours a day?' " says Mary K. Morse, a vice president of the Travis & Company headhunting firm, which recruits executives for technology and biomedical companies in southern New England.
"Their first choice would be to find the same opportunity right here," she says. "But many people are willing to make the sacrifice for the right job. The reality is, if they are going to open their options, they often have to look at Massachusetts."
She should know. Morse worked in Massachusetts for several years before realizing that she could do her job at home, in Barrington.
SOME EXPERTS say that Rhode Island will never be in the same league as Massachusetts, home to America's seventh-largest metropolitan area and to one of the nation's premier high-tech nodes: Routes 128 and 495. Boston, these people say, will always have the Red Sox and the Bruins, while Rhode Island makes do with the Paw Sox and the P-Bruins.
"We have the talent, but not the jobs," says Leonard P. Lardaro, an economist at the University of Rhode Island who has studied what he has termed the out-of-state job gap. "Rhode Island has redefined brain drain as 9-to-5."
Other experts take a rosier view. They say that the growing number of trains between the two states and a younger, more mobile work force willing to commute long distances and hopscotch from job to job have made the states' economies indistinguishable. And before long, they predict, high-paying New Economy jobs will spread to Rhode Island, as Massachusetts becomes a victim of its own success and workers flee south for less traffic and a better quality of life.
"We're taking advantage of Boston's strengths and weaknesses," says Christopher Bergstrom, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council. "Its strength is it's a powerhouse of innovation. Its weakness is it's musclebound: it's running out of people and running out of space."
There are already signs that Rhode Island is catching some of the Massachusetts spillover. Yet the big draw now is not jobs, but lifestyle. Rhode Island's small scale and reasonable real-estate prices figure prominently in the sales pitch of local job recruiters and economic boosters.
Fred M. Kuhr, 33, an editor at In Newsweekly, a Boston-based gay-and-lesbian regional newspaper, left his one-bedroom Back Bay apartment a year and a half ago, when the rent went from $1,075 to $1,500.
He and his partner, Kip Roberson, the public library director in Sharon, Mass., looked for a more affordable place in the Boston suburbs of Braintree and Quincy. But they found those communities boring, and decided instead on Providence. So they found a one-bedroom condominium on Benefit Street and bought it for $100,000 -- approximately a third of what a similar place would have cost in Boston.
"Providence offers all the good things you want from a city, with very few of the bad things," says Kuhr, who walks to the Providence station each morning to take the train to Boston. "You don't have the parking problems, congestion . . . Providence is much more livable."
Half of the eight units in his building house people with jobs in Boston, including an interior designer, a marketer, and an Internet worker.
Even Internet discussion groups have taken up the Providence-Boston topic. In one group, on "Goth" fashion, a woman recently complained about Boston's "stratospherically expensive" rents -- to which another group member responded:
Providence & the surrounding areas have some charm & lots of artsy types who are not of the trust-fund variety (the kind Boston teems with), it's tiny and easy to get around, and it's not much more difficult or timeconsuming to get to Boston than it would be if you lived in [Boston's] outer suburbs.
The author signed off with:
In the sticks, and glad for it.
THE LINES between the two states have always been somewhat arbitrary. No Rocky Mountain range or Mississippi River separates them.
Roger Williams did cross water from Massachusetts to found Providence, but the Seekonk River is not the states' boundary. And over the centuries, land has even shifted between Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
What has always separated the two New England states is culture -- Rhode Islanders' pungent accent and coffee-milk addiction being just two obvious examples.
"There is still a cultural border," says Joel Garreau, author of the book on suburban sprawl Edge City . "It seems there is something different in Seekonk."
Whenever the Pawtucket native sees the TV show Providence , he smiles. "They haven't got the accent right at all. And they don't get the humor -- self-deprecating and lightning-fast."
These cultural differences go back 350 years.
Fleeing the Massachusetts Puritans, Roger Williams embodied the independence of Rhode Islanders -- who later distinguished themselves by being the last of the 13 Colonies to ratify the Constitution.
And Rhode Island always had its distinct sources of wealth, from the South County plantations to the slave and East Indian trades to the Industrial Revolution -- born, on this continent, in Pawtucket.
By 1900, Rhode Island was the Silicon Valley of its day: a high-tech center that created the state-of-the-art machines that churned out the textiles and other goods that made Providence the richest city in America.
But then things changed. Seeking cheap labor, the factories increasingly moved South and, finally, overseas.
Meanwhile, Massachusetts also grew rich on the Industrial Revolution. But when its factories closed, that state found its way out of the decline through its prestigious research universities, which spawned the high-tech companies that define its economy today.
Moreover, Boston has always been New England's banking hub. Now, with the decade's growth in the stock market, the city has raised its profile as a global manager of money.
THE MASSACHUSETTS Bay Transportation Authority started commuter train service between Boston and Providence in 1988, and last summer it increased the daily round trips from five to eight. The number of riders has gone up by a third, to more than 800 each day.
When the MBTA train was late getting into Providence the other night, a passenger snorted: "We could always get work in Rhode Island -- right?"
The other passengers chuckled, recalls Louis Yeostros, the temp worker who commutes to Boston. "The sense was, You don't really have a choice -- not if you want to get paid well."
In 1999, according to the two states' labor departments, the average pay for software and communications work in Rhode Island was about $57,000, while in Massachusetts it was about $74,000. For finance and insurance jobs, in Rhode Island it was $45,000, versus Massachusetts's $72,000.
And that leaves aside the question of job opportunities.
Government figures show that the region's New Economy jobs are disproportionately concentrated in Massachusetts. Rhode Island is home to about 12 percent of all jobs in the "Greater Boston Metro" region -- which stretches from Rhode Island's South County to southern New Hampshire. Nonetheless, Rhode Island has only 6 percent of the jobs in finance, information, medical technology, electronics, and high technology.
But recently, those jobs have been inching closer to Rhode Island as Massachusetts companies seek less congestion, cheaper real estate, and access to new labor markets.
In 1999, EMC Corp., one of the country's leading makers of computer-data-storage systems, opened its largest factory, in Franklin, Mass. -- just 10 minutes from Woonsocket. The company now employs 600 Rhode Island residents, and by the end of the year plans to add 2,300 jobs at its facilities near the state line.
"You look at where some of the most significant growth in Massachusetts on [Route] 495 has been, and it's far south of the Massachusetts Turnpike," says Thomas E. Hubbard, vice president of the Massachustts Technology Collaborative, which promotes economic growth. "It's really in an area that has traditionally drawn workers out of Rhode Island."
The numbers seem to prove it.
In 1980, about 24,800 Rhode Island residents -- or about 6 percent of all employed residents -- worked in Massachusetts. By 1990, that number had soared to 46,400, or about 10 percent of all employed residents.
Comparable figures for 2000 won't be known until next year, when the U.S. Census Bureau releases them. But figures from the Massachusetts Department of Revenue show that from 1993 to 1998, the number of Rhode Islanders reporting a salary or wages in the Bay State grew from 48,290 to 66,158 -- from one out of 10 employed Ocean State residents to one out of seven.
ACUTELY AWARE of this labor drain, the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation has launched a web-site campaign called mass-exodus.com to entice southward-looking Massachusetts companies to actually cross the Rhode Island border.
The next phase of the EDC's campaign, starting next month, takes aim at Rhode Islanders who commute to Boston. Under the direction of the Providence ad firm Duffy & Shanley, the EDC staff will dress up as train conductors and hand out "schedules" that list such "stops" as:
Wait in subzero temps. Can't get a seat. Guy spills coffee on you. Woman next to you won't shut up. "When was the last time you had a bowl of cereal with your kid?" asks the back of schedule.
The EDC is calling its latest effort a "guerrilla marketing program" and hopes to sell commuters on the idea that Rhode Island is a "hot technology center."
Indeed, the state has succeeded recently in attracting a few small technology companies to locate here. And the number of Bay State residents commuting to Rhode Island is also increasing slightly. According to the Rhode Island Division of Taxation, about 41,300 Bay Staters reported earning at least some work or business income here in 1999, up from 38,000 in 1997.
But that's still about 40 percent fewer than the number of Rhode Islanders reporting income in Massachusetts. And some of those Rhode Islanders are skeptical that a publicity campaign could persuade thousands of Ocean State residents to take jobs closer to home.
"You don't all of a sudden turn into a hotbed of biotech and job creation in health care and technology," says William D. Vanech, 57, an East Side resident.
He left his job in Rhode Island in 1994 when Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in Boston offered him a significant pay increase. He is now a senior vice president, managing money for wealthy families and foundations; he says there are simply more of both in Boston.
"If I didn't have to commute," he says, "I wouldn't. The reason I do commute is because of opportunities that are not available to me in Rhode Island."
OTHERS MAY BE more receptive to the local anti-commuting campaign.
Every weekday, Thomas A. Padula, 47, takes car and train for a journey of more than two hours from South County's Hopkinton to Boston. A construction manager at an international engineering firm, he was offered a substantial raise to make this commute after the firm closed its Warwick office, a decade ago.
He wakes up at 3:15 a.m. to catch the 4:36 Amtrak train from Kingston, which pulls into Boston at about 6:45. He returns home at about 7 p.m. Three hours later he's in bed, and the cycle resumes.
"In that three hours," he says, "that's your time to have dinner, take a shower, unwind, and say hello to your family. You're constantly tired. It's not great for your home life."
Claudia Iannuccilli, the East Greenwich woman who works at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, says that she, her husband, and their three teenagers make a point of gathering each night for dinner.
While others in East Greenwich might spend their annual vacation in some exotic land, Iannuccilli devotes half of her four weeks' off to such basic parental activities as teacher conferences, doctors' appointments, and music recitals.
Occasionally, she'll take half a day off simply to be a mom.
"Sometimes it means coming home early -- just so you can pick them up from school and give them cookies."
-- With reports from staff writer David Herzog.
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