RELEASED TODAY: Regional and state unemployment rates were generally higher in November than in the prior month. Jobless rates rose in all four regions and 36 states, while only 6 states posted decreases, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The national jobless rate increased to 5.7 percent in November. Nonfarm employment decreased in 34 states.
Youths who start working young tend to continue working as they get older at higher rate than schoolmates who lack early work experience, according to the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics. High school is when bonds are formed with the labor market. About 65 percent of working students who were 15 at the start of the 1998-99 school year worked at a job sometime during the school year. And the following summer, 75 percent of 16-year-olds did the same, along with 78 percent of 18-year-olds, according to the first three annual rounds of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997 (Daily Labor Report, page D-4). Although workers in the United States were subject to an annual average of 1.7 million violent workplace acts from 1993 to 1999, the workplace crime rate fell 44 percent in that period, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics of the Department of Justice. Workplace homicides also fell during the period, down 39 percent, according to the BLS report "Violence in the workplace, 1993-1999". The rate of nonfatal workplace crime fell even faster than the overall crime rate -- down 44 percent in the period -- while the overall workplace crime rate dropped 40 percent. Workplace violence accounted for 18 percent of all violent crime during the 7-year period, the agency said. The report defines nonfatal violence as rape and sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault as measured by the National Crime Victimization Survey. The majority of the reported incidents at work were aggravated or simple assaults, the report said (Daily Labor Report, page A-8). The statistics on workplace violence issued today by the Department of Justice include attacks on police officers, who experienced violent crimes in the workplace at higher rats than all other occupations, with 261 incidents per 1,000 officers. College or university professors were attacked the least, 2 incidents per 1,000. Retail workers were attacked at a rate slightly higher than those in other fields. Cabbies ranked third, behind police officers and corrections officers, with 128 incidents per 1,000 drivers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics contributed information on workplace homicides for the report (The New York Times, page A13). Fewer Americans filed new claims for unemployment insurance, the third weekly decline in a row, raising the hope that the flurry of layoffs hitting workers after the terror attacks is abating. The Labor Department reported that for the workweek ending December 15, new claims for jobless benefits fell by a seasonally adjusted 11,000, to 384,000, the lowest level since July 28 (The Washington Post, page E2; Associated Press, The New York Times, page C2; The Wall Street Journal, page A2; USA Today, page B1; http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0112210213dec21.story). Consumers, after shopping up a storm in October, cut back on their spending in November by 0.7 percent. Incomes fell for the third straight month, as the nation's unemployment rate climbed to a 6-year high. Another report also released by the Commerce Department Friday showed that the U.S. economy turned in its weakest performance in a decade in the third quarter, shrinking at an annual rate of 1.3 percent, an even bigger drop than the government previously estimated. GDP is the total output of goods and services produced within the United States and is considered the broadest measure of the economy's health (Jeannine Aversa, Associated Press, http://www.nypost.com/apstories/business/V2114.htm).>
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