BLS DAILY REPORT, TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 1997 A tentative agreement was reached late Monday in the 15-day-old strike by the Teamsters against United Parcel Service, both the company and the union said. UPS workers could return to their jobs as early as Wednesday, said a union spokesperson. Voting on the new deal will be conducted by mail, and will take up to a month. Details of the deal were not available, but one negotiator said that it was a 5-year contract that increases the base wage for part-timers but does not include a contentious pension proposal made by the company. Negotiators were spurred on by Labor Secretary Alexis Herman, who pressured them back to the table when talks broke off. She also sat in on some of the 80 hours of negotiations that took place almost non-stop since Thursday (The Washington Post, page 1; The New York Times, page 1). Average hourly earnings 1994 to the present from the BLS Current Employment Statistics program are shown in a page 1 graph from The Wall Street Journal. The Federal Open Market Committee is expected to announce its decision on whether or not the Fed will leave interest rates unchanged at 2:15 p.m. ET today, according to USA Today (page B1). The roller-coaster stock market gives the Fed one more reason to leave interest rates unchanged, says the Gannett newspaper.__John M. Berry, writing in The Washington Post (page C1), says policymakers give no sign of alarm on inflation.
