> BLS DAILY REPORT, FRIDAY, JUNE 26, 1999:
>
> Today's BLS News Release: "College Enrollment and Work Activity of 1998
> High School Graduates" indicates that nearly two-thirds of 1998 high
> school graduates were enrolled in colleges or universities in the fall.
> The proportion of graduates going on to college was little changed from
> the prior 2 years. The rate had been about 62 percent from 1992 to 1995.
>
> Private industry paid on average, $19 per hour in March 1999, a 2.7
> percent increase in a year, the Labor Department reports. Private
> industry wages and salaries averaged $13.87 per hour per person in March
> 1999, nearly a 3 percent increase from one year earlier. Wages and
> salaries comprised 73 percent of total compensation. Benefits averaged
> $5.13 per person in March 1999, a 2.1 percent increase compared with March
> 1998. Benefits accounted for the remaining 27.5 percent of employer costs
> in March 1999 (Daily Labor Report, page D-1).
>
> New unemployment insurance claims filed with state agencies rose 3,000 for
> a seasonally adjusted 302,000 in the week ended June 19, the Employment
> and Training Administration announces (Daily Labor Report, page D-20).
>
> Steel imports in May increased more than 30 percent over the preliminary
> total for April, but fell 10 percent from May 1998, according to the
> Commerce Department (Daily Labor Report, page A-7; The Associated Press in
> The New York Times, page A19).
>
> Economic conditions are improving across the industrialized world, but
> increased growth rates are not translating into greater employment
> opportunities for young people, according to the Organization for Economic
> Cooperation and Development. Youth unemployment rates have risen across
> the OECD by an average of three points over the past 20 years. "Many young
> people face high unemployment or joblessness and serious difficulties in
> getting a foothold in the labor market," the OECD said. "Many leave school
> without the requisite skills or competencies needed in today's economy.
> Many are also experiencing falling relative (and sometimes real) wages,
> and considerable uncertainty as to whether or not they will be able to
> settle into good careers," the OECD said.
>
> More help-wanted advertisements appeared on average in major newspapers in
> May than in April, the Conference Board reports. "After an unexpected gain
> of over 300,000 new jobs in April, job growth slowed to a crawl in May".
> The Conference Board monitors help-wanted advertising in 51 major
> newspapers
> around the country. The Board economist predicts job growth will climb to
> 250,000 new jobs a month this summer -- "numbers that are sure to bring
> the unemployment rate down to 4 percent, perhaps by Labor Day" (Daily
> Labor Report, page A-1).
>
> Is the number of available but jobless workers in the United States
> shrinking to the point that employers may be forced to grant inflationary
> wage increases to attract new employees or keep the ones they have? Fed
> Chairman Alan Greenspan began raising that question about 2 years ago, and
> last week he cited the continued decline in the number of available
> workers as a key reason the Fed is likely to raise short-term interest
> rates at a policymaking session next week. Greenspan defines what he calls
> the "ever-shrinking pool of available labor" as the combination of two
> sets of would-be workers. The first comprises the officially unemployed
> -- people who don't have a job, but actively looked for work in the 4-week
> period prior to the Labor Department's monthly survey of 50,000 U.S.
> households. There were 5.5 million people in that category last month,
> resulting in a national unemployment rate of 4.2 percent -- close to a
> 3-decade low. The second group -- at 5.3 million, almost as large as the
> first -- includes people who weren't looking for a job in the previous
> month but did so sometime in the prior 12 months, and said they both want
> a job and are available to work. Over the past 5 years, this combined
> pool of available but jobless workers has declined by 28 percent, from
> 16.5 million in January 1994 to 10.8 million last month. But Greenspan
> acknowledged last week that "labor market tightness has not, as yet, put
> the current (economic) expansion at risk" by generating inflationary wage
> increases. Economists and policymakers have suggested a variety of
> reasons that the shrinking pool of available workers hasn't triggered the
> sort of upward spiral in wages that it usually did in the past. At the
> head of the list is the increasingly competitive nature of the U.S.
> economy, which has caused most business executives to conclude that they
> can't raise the prices of the goods and services they sell -- or at least
> not by very much -- without losing market share and profits to their
> rivals. "If you think you can't raise prices no matter what, you
> substitute capital for labor" in many different ways, Fed Vice Chairman
> Alice Rivlin ways. "I think that is what has happened." In a sense,
> Rivlin said, the shortage of labor has caused managers to take the
> necessary steps to increase productivity, and as the shortage has gotten
> worse, the search for productivity-enhancing actions has become even more
> intense (John M.Berry in The Washington Post, page E1).
> __Economic growth is strong and unemployment is declining, but healthy
> productivity increases have helped keep inflation down, providing mixed
> signals to the Federal Reserve as it considers an interest rate increase,
> says The New York Times, in an article by Richard W. Stevenson (page C1).
> Uncertainty about the Fed's intentions could be seen on Wall Street today,
> where stock and bond prices fell on concern that next week's likely
> interest rate increase will not be the last. The article is illustrated
> by graphs that show inflation, gross domestic product, worker productivity
> and unemployment, with the source of the data given as BLS and Commerce.
>
> Durable goods orders jumped a solid 1.4 percent in May to a seasonally
> adjusted $197.6 billion, led by big gains in aircraft, autos and other
> transportation products, the Commerce Department said (The Washington
> Post, page E12; The New York Times, page C3).
> __May's increase in overall durable goods orders, combined with the drop
> in the so-called core figure, extended a seesaw pattern that began early
> in the year. Still the manufacturing sector appears to be expanding (The
> Wall Street Journal, page A2).
>
> Workers at the nation's largest textile plant -- a huge brick fortress of
> resistance to labor organizing in the South -- apparently ended a 93-year
> epoch on Wednesday night and voted to allow a textile workers union inside
> the walls to represent them. "It's the biggest breakthrough in a
> traditional Southern industry for probably the past quarter-century," says
> Leon Fink, a labor historian at the University of North Carolina. The
> percent of the work force in the South that belongs to unions is lower
> than in the rest of the country. While 13.5 percent of the work force
> belongs to unions nationwide, two professors at Florida State University,
> Barry T. Hirsch and David A. Macpherson, found that just 4.2 percent of
> workers in North Carolina belong to unions. In South Carolina, the figure
> is 4.5 percent. The percent of unionized private-sector employees in the
> South continues to fall faster than in the country as a whole, to 4.1
> percent in 1998 from 7.1 percent in 1985, says the Bureau of National
> Affairs, a private research organization in Washington, D.C. But several
> Southern states, notably the textile belt of North Carolina, South
> Carolina and Virginia, have seen increases in unionization in the last 3
> years (The New York Times, page 1)
> __The nation's largest textile union claimed victory in organizing more
> than 5,000 workers at six Fieldcrest Cannon plants in Kannapolis, North
> Carolina (The Wall Street Journal, page A2).
>
>
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