Salaries and Wages
Rising retail, restaurant, fast-food wages make hiring tougher for manufacturing, construction, health care
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USA TODAY
Faye Ashley seemed destined for a career as a dental assistant.
Her mother was a nurse, her sister, a nurse practitioner.
She took yearlong dentistry courses at a Pennsylvania community college before landing a $10.50-an-hour job at a small practice in Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
Ashley enjoyed calming patients’ nerves and saw her hourly wages climb to $21 over a dozen years, most recently at a dental office in Woodstock, Virginia.
But when day care centers shut down as the COVID-19 pandemic began in spring 2020, the single mother quit to care for her two young daughters and never returned.