> BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, MAY 7, 2001:
>
> Payroll cuts reported for April -- a huge 223,000 by nonfarm employers --
> may turn out to be the largest monthly drop for the current economic
> slowdown, analysts predict in assessing the employment figures released by
> the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It was the largest monthly drop in
> payrolls since February 1991. The civilian unemployment rate rose 0.2
> percentage point to 4.5 percent in April, its highest level since October
> 1998. "Labor market conditions weakened considerably in April," says BLS
> Commissioner Katharine Abraham. The biggest shift in April's report was
> the widespread nature of job losses that had been concentrated in
> manufacturing and help supply services, she says. It was the first time
> that job losses occurred in many service industries as well as
> construction and manufacturing. Earnings figures showed gains that are
> likely to support a modest level of consumer spending, says the Bank One
> chief economist in Chicago (Daily Labor Report, page D-1; Text E-1).
>
>
> The U.S. economy shed nearly a quarter of a million jobs during April, the
> government reported yesterday, all but dashing hopes that the economic
> slowdown that began last summer had nearly run its course. "The fallout
> from a deteriorating job market on consumer spending hasn't kicked in yet,
> and when it does, it won't be pretty," said Allen Sinai, a leading
> economic forecaster (Steven Pearlstein and John M. Berry, The Washington
> Post, May 5, page A1).
>
> The American job creation machine went into reverse in April, as companies
> shed employees across much of the weak economy. The unemployment rate,
> which has been inching up from a low of 3.9 percent in October, rose
> again, to 4.5 percent from 4.3 percent in March. "The flow of new people
> into unemployment is clearly rising," says Thomas Nardone, chief of the
> division that compiles the job figures at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
> All of the Labor Department's numbers are seasonally adjusted to offset
> employment trends that might otherwise distort the figures. That is, the
> Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates how many jobs should have been
> created in April in a normal year -- 895,000, in fact, and since only
> 672,000 showed up in the surveys of business payrolls, that counted as a
> job loss of 223,000. What validates this process, Mr. Nardone says, are
> the trends, and the trend has been downward -- from an average of 256,000
> new jobs created each month in the first 4 months of last year to a
> monthly decline, on average, of 14,000 in the same period this year. The
> jump in unemployment last month came mostly at the expense of teenagers,
> whose unemployment rate rose to 14.2 from 13.8 percent in March, and
> whites, whose jobless rate increased to 4 percent from 3.7 percent in
> March. That is half the black rate of 8.2 percent, which fell slightly.
> College graduates are also being hit, in part because of the devastation
> in the dot-com world (Louis Uchitelle in The New York Times, May 5, page
> A1).
>
> Arrests of illegal immigrants are down sharply along the border, as the
> traditional post-winter flood of illegal Mexican workers returning to U.S.
> jobs has fallen to the lowest level in nearly a decade, writes Joel
> Millman from San Diego, California, in The Wall Street Journal's column
> "The Outlook" (page A1). "We're now seeing the numerical evidence of
> something that has been unfolding for 15 years," says an immigration
> scholar with the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, D.C. "That is, the
> full integration of the Mexican labor market with the bottom half of the
> U.S. labor market." Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics this
> spring support that view. BLS defines job categories by race, with
> "Hispanic" serving as a close proxy for Mexican immigrants. The 1990s
> ramp-up of Hispanic-Mexican participation in dozens of categories -- from
> meat cutter to carpet layer to landscaper -- has transformed whole sectors
> of the U.S. economy that now are staffed by younger, more mobile work
> forces than the ones they replaced. According to BLS figures, U.S.
> businesses added more than 12 million wage earners to their payrolls from
> 1994 through 2000, about a quarter of them Hispanics. In construction, a
> net importer of more than 400,000 immigrant laborers over the decade,
> certain jobs have become almost entirely "Mexicanized". For example,
> three of every four new carpet layers were Spanish speakers. In drywall
> hanging, where two of every five workers are Hispanic, immigrants
> accounted for virtually all the 52,000 jobs added during the period. This
> phenomenon is also taking place across declining industries. The BLS
> category "machine operators and tenders," lost nearly 500,000 jobs between
> 1994 and 2000, but saw a net gain of nearly 150,000 jobs held by
> Hispanics.
>
> The economic slowdown may negatively affect productivity growth, but "the
> good fundamentals supporting productivity growth appear to remain in
> place," the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago says (Daily
> Labor Report, page A-2).
>
> The motor vehicle industry is employing an all-time high number of
> workers, adding 311,200 U.S. jobs between 1982 and 2000, defying
> expectations that economic globalization would result in the elimination
> of manufacturing jobs in the United States, according to the executive
> director of a research project studying the effect of globalization on
> jobs in the motor vehicle industry. While U.S. automakers scramble to meet
> increasing consumer demand, a significant shift has occurred in the way in
> which employers have been allocating employment costs, he explains at a
> forum hosted by the Sloan Foundation and the Economic Strategy Institute.
> In the last 15 years, he says, many of the jobs added in the auto industry
> involved the manufacture of parts, rather than higher-paying assembly
> jobs. Foreign auto companies have added about 80,000 manufacturing jobs in
> the United States, he says (Daily Labor Report, page A-5).
>
> DUE OUT TOMORROW: Productivity and Costs -- First Quarter 2001 (p)
>
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