[PEN-L:725] BLS Daily Report

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BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, AUGUST 10, 1998:

Nonfarm payroll employment rose by a seasonally adjusted 66,000 in July,
held down by a big drop in factory jobs caused by the strike against
General Motors Corp., the Labor Department reports.  The unemployment
rate held steady at 4.5 percent.  Nonfarm payrolls rose by a little more
than 200,000 when the effects of the strike are removed from
calculations.  This follows a revised gain of 196,000 jobs in June. On
release of the employment report, President Clinton said that even with
the GM strike, "We still see that over the past year, wages have risen
at more than twice the rate of inflation, the fastest real wage growth
for ordinary Americans for 20 years.  We have low unemployment, low
inflation, strong growth and higher wages."  Manufacturing employment
plunged by 176,000 in July.  BLS Commissioner Katharine G. Abraham told
the Joint Economic Committee that the agency can directly identify
135,000 of these lost jobs with people on strike or laid off because of
the United Auto Workers walkout. (Daily Labor Report, page D-1; Text of
Commissioner Abraham's Statement on Release of the July Employment
Report Given Before the Joint Economic Committee August 7, 1998 on page
E-1).
__The nation's jobless rate was unchanged last month at 4.5 percent, but
the now-settled GM strike slowed job creation, holding the monthly gain
in payroll jobs to just 66,000, the Labor Department reported yesterday.
Aside from the strike-related distortions, a number of details in the
report suggested that the nation's tight labor markets have begun to
loosen a bit, analysts said (The Washington Post, August 8, page D1).
__The economy created jobs at a slower but still robust pace last month,
and the unemployment rate held steady at 4.5 percent, the Labor
Department reported.  Continued strong employment growth in service
industries more than offset the damage that Asia's woes are inflicting
on manufacturers (The New York Times, page 1, August 8).
__The economy last month suffered the biggest loss of factory jobs in 16
years, a clear sign that the manufacturing sector, once a strong engine
of employment, is sputtering.  The Labor Department said manufacturing
jobs fell a seasonally adjusted 176,000 in July, holding overall U.S.
payroll growth to just 66,000, the weakest monthly gain in 30 months.
About 140,000 of these lost jobs were affected directly or indirectly by
the UAW strike against General Motors (The Wall Street Journal, page A2.
The Journal's page 1 graph is of the unemployment rate, 1995 to the
present). 

Poverty is a reality for three to 10 Americans, but for most of them,
it's short-lived, the Census Bureau reports.  Over a 3-year span, from
1993 to 1995, 30.3 percent of the population lived below the poverty
line for at least 2 months.  But just 5.3 percent of them stayed poor
for 2 full years. The government considers a three-person family poor if
its income is below $13,650; for a four person family, the threshold is
$16,450.  The most likely to be poor were families headed by single
mothers.  In 1994, nearly half of the female-headed households lived in
poverty for at least 2 months in a row, more than 3 times the rate of
married couples (The Washington Post, which carried an Associated Press
story, page A6).

The Clinton Administration will abandon a controversial pay formula used
to calculate annual salary increases for 1.3 million white-collar
federal employees, reopening debate in Congress and inside the
bureaucracy over how to determine the worth of government jobs.  The
decision, outlined last week, means the government will move to a new
statistical method for determining "locality pay," a system aimed at
boosting federal pay, based on salary comparisons with private sector
jobs.  While the decision centers on arcane statistical techniques, it
will likely reinforce widespread perceptions among federal workers that
their pay system has broken down.  The administration's move toward a
new pay calculation method will not affect federal workers for the next
3 or 4 years, officials said.  Congress and the White House have invoked
an "escape clause" in the federal pay law that allows them to disregard
the recommendations of the current formula because they are too high.
The system, which took effect in 1994, has two components:  A nationwide
adjustment based on the Employment Cost Index and locality adjustments
based on wage surveys in 32 metropolitan areas (The Washington Post "The
Federal Page", page A15).

Gas prices fell nearly 2 cents a gallon at the pump in 2 weeks,
continuing a nearly yearlong plunge, an oil industry analyst said today.
The Lundberg Survey of 10,000 stations nationwide found that the average
retail price, including all grades and taxes, was about a quarter cent
under $1.11 on Friday, that was down 1.81 cents from the July 24 survey
(The New York Times, page D5). 



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