BLS DAILY REPORT, WEDNESDAY, JULY 3, 1996 Nonfarm payroll employment increased in 43 states in May, with West Virginia reporting the largest percentage gain at 1.7 percent, BLS reported ....(Daily Labor Report, page D-2). In an address to the National Press Club, Labor Secretary Reich "blasts" GOP minimum wage amendments (Daily Labor Report, pages 1,A-7,E-3) ....In one of his points, Reich talks about the proposal "to exclude anyone who's in a job less than six months. Because low-wage workers change jobs so often, the practical effect of this would be to deny a raise to 42 percent of workers who would otherwise get one. That's four million working people" ....The point is based on a table from BLS that shows the percentage of hourly paid workers by hourly wage rate and tenure with current employer. The all-industries median first-year wage increase compiled in the first half of 1996 is 3 percent an hour, according to the latest biweekly survey by BNA (Daily Report, pages 2,D-14). In manufacturing agreements, the year-to-date median wage increase is 2.8 percent an hour; in nonmanufacturing settlements (excluding construction), the median wage increase is 2.9 percent. In construction agreements, the year-to-date median wage increase is 3.5 percent .... The index of leading economic indicators rose 0.3 percent to 102.4 percent of its 1987 base in May, marking the fourth consecutive monthly advance, the Conference Board reports (Daily Labor Report, page D-1; Washington Post, page F1; Wall Street Journal, page A2; and USA Today, page 1B) ....The increases were in 7 of the 11 leading indicators, including the average factory workweek ....Most analysts interpreted the latest figures as more evidence that the economy is likely to stay on a growth track over the next few months .... By the end of the year, the Conference Board plans to incorporate yet-to-be- determined changes in the index of leading economic indicators in an attempt to improve its predictive ability (Daily Labor Report, page A-10) ....Two likely changes are the elimination of the sensitive materials prices component and the addition of a component based on the yield curve for Treasury bonds ....Currently the sensitive materials prices component is based on data from the BLS producer price index and from spot price data from the Commodity Research Bureau. There are no energy prices in the component .... It has been an article of faith that immigrants fit swiftly into the economic mainstream, says The Wall Street Journal (page A2). Emerging research, however, lately has suggested that the opposite may be true, that many newcomer groups, on average, fail to earn as much as native-born workers. Now, that controversial conclusion is strengthened by an elaborate new study from Rand Corp., which finds that some groups of new arrivals -- especially immigrants from Mexico -- earn much less than the U.S. average for decades, even as groups such as some Asian newcomers are far outperforming American-born counterparts. Based on detailed census data from 1970 to 1990, the think tank concludes that widely varying education levels among different nationalities have resulted in very different economic progress. The study also found that education levels of American-born workers as a group have climbed faster than those of immigrants overall .... DUE OUT FRIDAY: The Employment Situation: June 1996
