BLS DAILY REPORT, TUESDAY, MARCH 18, 1997
RELEASED TODAY: All four of the regions in the U.S. and seven of the
nine divisions experienced small declines in their unemployment rates
from 1995 to 1996 as the national rate edged down from 5.6 to 5.4
percent (annual averages). The states were nearly equally divided
between those in which jobless rates rose over the year and those in
which rates fell ....
Blocking Congress from "any arbitrary change" in the way it calculates
cost-of-living increases currently tied to the CPI is a top
legislative priority, Communications Workers of American President
Morton Bahr tells the union's legislative forum. Bahr specifically
targeted a Senate bill (S 425) that would create a cost-of-living
board to decide the inflation adjustment each year for federal benefit
programs, including Social Security and federal employee pensions.
Bahr said this commission -- premised on allegations that the CPI
overstates inflation -- would have a downward push on wages. "Unions
bargain on wages that will keep workers ahead of inflation," Bahr said
...."Any change in the CPI must be done by the BLS and it must be
based on research, not for political expediency," Bahr said ....(Daily
Labor Report, page A-6).
Gary D. Becker, 1992 Nobel laureate who teaches at the University of
Chicago and is a Fellow of the Hoover Institution, writes that
Europeans have defended their highly regulated and overtaxed labor
markets by claiming that they produce less inequality in wages than
the more free-market practices in the U.S. and Britain. They
emphasize that, since the late 1970s, salary rates in America and
Britain for the better-educated and more skilled have climbed sharply
relative to those of other workers. By contrast, the
skilled-unskilled wage disparity only increased modestly in Germany,
France, and most other Western European countries. But many European
nations experienced a distressing change during the late 1980s and the
1990s: The number of persons without jobs expanded greatly
....(Business Week, March 17, page 23).
DUE OUT TOMORROW:
Consumer Price Index -- February 1997
Real Earnings: February 1997
