BLS DAILY REPORT, TUESDAY, JUNE 26, 2001:
> The median compensation level for top human resource executives has
> climbed to more than $200,000 in salary and bonuses, according to survey
> results released at the Society for Human Resource Management's annual
> conference. In general, the pay levels reported in the 2001 HR
> compensation survey are higher than those reported in the 2000 survey.
> Positions for which large numbers of responding employers were able to
> report compensation data increases ranged from 8.7 percent for payroll
> managers to 2.0 percent for HR generalists and compensation analysts. The
> 2001 survey reports median pay levels of $68,000 for payroll managers,
> $50,000 for HR generalists, and $45,000 for compensation analysts. The
> median compensation level for technical trainers was $58,000 in 2001, 15.2
> percent above the 2000 median. The median pay level for equal employment
> opportunity/diversity managers is $90,000, a jump of 11.5 percent over
> last year's figure. In contrast, the survey recorded increases of 2.0
> percent or less for a number of lower-level jobs (Daily Labor Report, page
> A-4).
>
> More than one-third of the American public has not yet developed a
> financial plan in preparation for retirement, according to a Scudder
> Investments survey dated June 2001. Eighty percent of higher income
> households, those with incomes greater than $50,000, have developed one,
> however. To prepare for retirement, 72 percent of Americans are cutting
> expenses, 49 percent are contributing to a 401(k) plan, and 35 percent are
> contributing to an IRA or SEP. GenXers (age 25-36) contribute to 401(k)
> plans more than any other generation (66 percent). GIs and WWII veterans
> (age 69+) contribute to IRAs or SEPs more than any other generation (46
> percent). Forty percent of women, compared with 28 percent of men, are
> depending on Social Security (Daily Labor Report, page A-5).
>
> Hundreds of thousands of women in their 60's, part of the surge of
> divorces that started a generation ago, are finding themselves forced to
> stay in the work force because they lack sufficient money to retire.
> Wages, in effect, are becoming their pensions. Women alone in old age
> have always been at greater risk of falling into poverty than have married
> women. But until recently, women alone generally meant widows, who at
> least had the pensions and savings their husbands had left them, and a
> tradition of living with children.. Widows greatly outnumbered older
> divorced women until the late 1990's, but now for the first time the
> divorced outnumber widows. The median weekly wage of a woman working
> full time today is only 76 percent of a man's weekly median, the Labor
> Department reports -- qualifying women for smaller pensions. And women
> are less likely to hold jobs that include company pensions than are men.
> Putting all these advantages together, men over the age of 65 average
> nearly $30,000 a year in income, double the average for women. ...... As a
> result of the various pressures, the labor force participation rates of
> women in their early 60's -- covering those holding jobs or hunting for
> them -- rose to a record 40.1 percent last year, from 32.6 percent in
> 1981, and there has been a similar steady rise among women in their late
> 60's. The proportion of older men in the labor force, in contrast, has
> fallen significantly the last 30 years, although recently it has inched
> up. (Louis Uchitelle, The New York Times, page 1).
>
> Last week, the National Bureau of Economic Research, a group of academics
> widely considered to be the official referee of economic cycles, released
> a statement saying that there is now "the possibility that a recession
> began recently. But Alan Greenspan, his colleagues at the Fed, and nearly
> all Wall Street economists think that the $10 trillion American economy
> can be turned around more quickly than ever before. The credit, they say,
> belongs to a "new economy" that has survived the bursting of the dot-com
> bubble and is altering decades-old economic patterns. The technological
> innovations of recent years have allowed the average worker to produce
> more goods in an hour, most economists say. This has kept inflation low
> because companies do not have to raise prices -- even as the long
> expansion has caused wages to rise -- to increase their profits. (David
> Leonhardt, The New York Times, page C1).
>
> Housing prices across the nation have held firm during the current
> economic downturn as a result of the Federal Reserve's aggressive policy
> to lower interest rates and the limited amount of homes available,
> according to a report to be released today by Harvard University's Joint
> Center for Housing Studies. Both home prices and rents have risen faster
> than inflation in recent years. The median sales price of a single-family
> home hit $145,500 in May, the highest on record, according to the National
> Association of Realtors (Isaac Baker, Boston Globe correspondent,
> http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/177/business/Housing_market_defies_downt
> urn%2b.shtml 6/26/01).
>
> DUE OUT TOMORROW: "Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment, May
> 2001".
>
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