BLS DAILY REPORT, FRIDAY, APRIL 18, 1997 RELEASED TODAY: Median weekly earnings of the nation's 90.7 million full-time wage and salary workers were $504 in the first quarter of 1997. This was 3.1 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 3.0 percent in the CPI-U over the same period .... New claims filed with state agencies for unemployment insurance benefits increased by 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted total of 332,000 during the week ended April 12, the Employment and Training Administration of the Department of Labor reports ....(Daily Labor Report, page D-8). The nation is heading into the next century with an aging work force that will include increasing numbers of workers forced to stay on the job longer because they cannot afford to retire, says The Washington Post (page G3). That outlook emerged from the Workforce 2020 report of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. The report also raises the specter of a work force increasingly divided by education and skills into the "haves" and "have-nots," with little hope for the low-skilled unless major changes are made in education and employment policies. The work force is expected to remain dominated by white non-Hispanics. But Hispanics -- a population grouping that includes whites and blacks -- will gradually displace African Americans as the largest minority ethnic group in the work force, the report said, drawing on U.S. Census Bureau projections. [The accompanying chart, however, credits BLS.] But the biggest single workplace change taking place over the next generation will be the aging of the work force, according to the authors ....The simple truth for many workers in the baby boom generation is that they will not be able to afford to retire when they reach age 65, according to the report .... U.S. trade deficit narrowed in February as exports hit new high ....(Daily Labor Report, page D-1).
