First, the good news. For many enjoying Virginia’s technology-driven economic boom, salary and benefits are up, way up. As Virginia Business’ annual compensation survey shows, 16 of the 100 best-compensated executives in the state are making in the eight figures, four more top managers than last year. More are younger and three are women, showing that old bastions of power are being broken apart. As our special report that begins on Page 9 also explains, firms are scrambling to come up with ways to retain hard-to-replace workers farther down the food chain as well. To keep skilled professionals and experienced middle managers, they are becoming less buttoned down, more flexible and more generous. Besides offering big money and stock options to keep talented people on board, they are including perks such as day care, luxury cars and leisure travel in their baskets of goodies.

Now, the bad news. The good times aren’t exactly rolling for everyone. In fact, most nine-to-fivers, who are the salt of the earth of Virginia’s economy, aren’t invited to the party. According to William Mezger, chief economist with the Virginia Employment Commission, manufacturing production wages rose only 3.8 percent for the year ended this June. Average wages rose only about 4 percent for the period, and that includes the mega-wages of the executives whom we are profiling. That’s just a couple of points above inflation. Meanwhile, the productivity of Virginia and U.S. workers has increased markedly, but they are not enjoying the benefits of the improvement.

What gives? Many people are starting to ask that question. The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, reports that even though working conditions and productivity have greatly improved in the United States in the past five years, this country has slipped behind countries such as Britain, Denmark, Germany and even Spain in the growth of compensation for labor. Former junk bond king Michael Milken, a free-market advocate if there ever was one, writes in The Wall Street Journal that, adjusted for inflation, a 30-year-old American man with a high school diploma — the typical blue collar worker — actually is earning 20 percent less than his 1974 counterpart. The only solution, argues Milken, is to continually boost worker education. By coincidence, we have two stories on that topic starting on Page 73. Our pieces note that it’s harder to hang onto good Ph.D. candidates in technology while the Internet can make teaching workers faster and more efficient.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers for the disparity in compensation. The better treatment that workers are getting at higher-end technology firms should trickle down to other companies in the state and we should applaud that. Yet the results will still be limited. Not everyone can be educated for higher level jobs, and the state and private sector may fail to provide adequate training. Meanwhile, Virginia is facing a sad contradiction. It can boast of its huge successes with high technology and come up with enough money to import top brains from other parts of the country. At the same time, it is playing its more traditional role as the typical Southern state by hawking cheap labor for exploitation by out-of-state corporations.