Why record tourist year is not as good as it sounds

More than 41 million people visited L.A. County in 2012, which is a 2.5 percent increase from a year earlier. And more visitors resulted in more employment: Close to 20,000 jobs in the hospitality industry were added to the rolls from November 2011 to November 2012. So all that's great - well, until you see that the average annual wage in the hospitality and tourism industry is only around $35,000. That ranks dead last among the 14 largest industry clusters examined by the L.A. Economic Development Corporation - and it's $20,000 lower than average. (Financial services was tops, at $133,000.) Not to pooh-pooh a nice statistic, but a little context please. You can't grow an economy on $35,000-a-year dead-end jobs. It takes higher wages in sectors like manufacturing and construction - sectors that, while improving, are far from robust.