Should we be
suspicious? These are the guys who
love secrecy and ‘privacy’. Just another
example of underfunding? And the war
hasn’t even started yet. KWC U.S. Drops Report On
Mass Layoffs
By Kirstin Downey,
Washington Post Staff Writer. Thursday, January 2, 2003 Citing a shortage of
money, the Bureau
of Labor Statistics
will stop publishing information about factory closings across the country, a
decision that some state officials and labor leaders are protesting. The monthly Labor Department analysis,
known as the Mass
Layoffs Statistics
report, detailed where workplaces with more than 50 employees closed and what
kinds of workers were affected. "We have finite
resources," said Mason
M. Bishop,
deputy assistant secretary for the Labor Department's Employment and Training
Administration, which has been paying about $6.6 million a year for the BLS
report. The department made the
announcement on Christmas Eve, as a note on its November -- and final --
report. The report said U.S. employers initiated
2,150 mass layoffs in November, with workers in manufacturing most affected.
About 240,000 workers lost their jobs, it said. Bishop said that the Labor Department had only $30 million for
its dislocated-worker demonstration project, and that it could no longer afford the report.
"We believe we need to be funding programs that get people back to
work," he said. Some state
officials, who help compile data for the report, criticized the decision. They said the monthly reports helped them steer unemployed
people to jobs in new industries. "In the current
recession, MLS
data have increased in value and are being followed and evaluated more closely," Catherine B. Leapheart, president
of the National Association of State Work Force Agencies, wrote in a letter to
Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao. "The states have come to rely on this
information as an economic indicator and a tool for operational decisions on
service delivery and funding allocations for dislocated-worker programs." State officials around
the country said they were surprised and unhappy to hear the report was
canceled. "In these times when the economy
is in transition, knowing what's going on and who it's going on to, is
critical,"
said Harry E. Payne Jr., chairman of the North Carolina Employment Security
Commission. "It's an axiom of
human nature that you focus on what you can measure. Now they are taking away a
measure." Payne said North
Carolina has been hard hit by plant closings, including those by textile and
fiber-optics companies that have moved jobs overseas. He said the program was
the only national, standardized source of data tracking plant closings,
allowing states to compare their manufacturing layoffs with those of other
states. "To give it up is
just awful," said Beverly Gumola of the Illinois Department of Employment
Security. State officials use the data to determine "which occupations are
going kaput," she said. Christine L. Owens, director of public policy for the
AFL-CIO, whose member unions have been hard hit by the loss of manufacturing
jobs, said eliminating
the report is
an example of a
"let-them-eat-cake approach" by the Bush administration. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63950-2003Jan1.html Outgoing mail
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