BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, DAILY REPORT, THURSDAY, APRIL 11, 2002: RELEASED TODAY: The U.S. Import Price Index increased 1.1 percent in March, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The increase, the largest since September 2000, was attributable to a large jump in petroleum prices. The Export Price Index also increased in March, up 0.3 percent, after declining in each of the previous 5 months.
A declining trend in the most severe class of workplace injuries plateaued in 2000, as employers recorded 1.7 million injuries and illnesses requiring a day or more of recovery time -- the same figure as the year before -- the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. In contrast, BLS says, the number of reported restricted duty cases, those where injured workers return to the workplace but perform less strenuous jobs, dropped slightly in 2000. By occupation, truck drivers had the highest total number of injuries requiring time away from work, with a total of 136,000 cases in 2000, according to BLS. Musculoskeletal disorders -- including back injuries, carpal tunnel syndrome, and neck and tendon disorders -- accounted for more than one-third of the total U.S. injuries and illnesses requiring time away from work, or 34.7 percent of the total in 2000, BLS says (Daily Labor Report, page D-1). Two trends in compensation for chief executive officers were evident in 2001 -- an ongoing divide between company performance and executive pay, and a double standard on retirement and job security for CEOs compared with workers, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard L. Trumka, said April 10. While CEO pay usually is based on performance, he said, corporate profits declined by 35 percent, stock prices fell by 13 percent, and 1.4 million workers were laid off last year. Trumka said that while some CEOs took pay cuts, lowering average pay by 8 percent, the majority got raises, raising median pay by 7 percent (Daily Labor Report, page A-4). Fewer Americans filed claims for unemployment insurance last week, though the layoffs picture continues to be clouded by a technical fluke that was a big factor in the surge in claims during the week before. The Labor Department reported today that new claims for jobless benefits dropped by a seasonally adjusted 55,000 to 438,000, for the work week ending April 6. Even with the decline, a government analyst said the claims number continued to be inflated because of the fluke: Laid-off workers seeking to take advantage of a federal extension for benefits were required to submit new claims. Congress recently passed legislation signed into law by President Bush that provided a 13-week extension of jobless benefits (Jeannine Aversa, Associated Press, http://www.nandotimes.com/business/story/355432p-2895178c.html). The nation's leading retailers reported solid sales gains in March, although an expected boost from the Easter holiday was muted by unseasonably cool weather and shoppers' continued reluctance to splurge. As the big stores released their sales figures today, analysts said they were heartened by an improvement in the battered department store sector. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., the world's largest retailer, again outperformed the rest of the industry. It raised its sales projections for the first quarter today, after reporting impressive March sales gains that beat Wall Street expectations, Anne D'Innocenzio, Associated Press, http://www.nypost.com/apstories/business/V3241.htm). Even during the recent recession, municipalities across the nation have been adopting "living wage" laws, which have a higher pay scale than the longstanding federal and state minimum wage laws. Thus far, about 82 cities, counties, and universities have enacted living wage laws over the past 11 years, and campaigns are underway in more than 75 other areas across the country, according to ACORN, the grass-roots organization spearheading most of the living wage movement. The number of workers affected by the law nationally has been small, as few as 100,000, according to one report (Boston Globe). In a surprisingly hawkish interview, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President William Poole says the Fed must be vigilant in its fight against inflation even though price pressures in the U.S. economy currently are benign. Poole says the Fed does not have to wait for unemployment to fall for policymakers to feel comfortable raising interest rates, as some analysts argue. The jobless rate, which rose from 5.5 percent in February to 5.7 percent in March, is subject to too many outside factors, such as bad weather or an influx of workers in the labor force, he says. "If the unemployment rate is the only thing that is sticking out there, and everything else is going the other way, then the unemployment rate is not decisive," Poole says. Other Fed officials have been more cautionary. Dallas Fed President Robert McTeer told Reuters last week he wanted to see the unemployment rate fall below 5 percent and industrial activity expand before he thought about raising rates (USA Today, page 3B). DUE OUT TOMORROW: Producer Price Indexes -- March 2002
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