BLS DAILY REPORT, TUESDAY, JANUARY 28, 1997 RELEASED TODAY: The Employment Cost Index for December 1996 was 130.9 (June 1989=100), an increase of 2.9 percent from December 1995 ....On a seasonally adjusted basis, compensation costs for civilian workers (private industry plus state and local governments) increased 0.8 percent in the three months that ended December 1996. This continued a pattern of increases that have ranged from 0.6 to 0.8 percent for the last three years. Wages and salaries increased 0.8 percent during the September-December 1996 period. The increase for the June-September period was 0.6 percent. Benefit costs increased 0.7 percent in December; in September, these costs increased 0.6 percent .... In an article about ex-welfare moms who are taking traditionally male jobs, yesterday's Washington Post (page B1) quotes BLS figures -- women represented only 0.08 percent of the nation's carpenters, 1.3 percent of the plumbers, steamfitters, and pipe fitters, and 0.7 percent of the mechanics, but 97.8 percent of the secretaries. The reasons for the disparity are multiple and complex, and barriers such as discrimination and sexual harassment will not tumble easily, analysts say. Perhaps more important, most women simply shy away from construction work, economists and others say ....In addition, women, who assume most child-care responsibilities, have other concerns, said Howard Hayghe, a BLS economist. "If your kid gets sick at school, how does the school get word to the mother on the construction site?" he said. "In the summer, construction workers can work from sunup to sundown. How is a mother going to find day care for such bizarre hours?" .... Sunday's New York Times (page A1) says that, as hospitals merge and shrink under pressure from managed care, a large and growing number of senior doctors and nurses have found themselves suddenly dismissed or demoted at the height of their careers. With their high salaries and roots in old-style medicine, older doctors and nurses are natural targets for hospitals trying desperately to economize, health experts say. And when hospitals merge, even world-renowned doctors can become redundant. No institution needs two chiefs of cardiac surgery, for example. Health industry experts estimate that thousands of senior staff members have lost jobs or their supervisory positions .... No longer just helpers who keep the boss's calendar straight and take dictation, career secretaries and administrative assistants have, in the last decade, increasingly taken on the duties of middle managers. The reasons are varied. Because of downsizing, there are fewer middle-managers around, and companies have given many of the unfilled responsibilities to secretaries. And with executives typing memos on their laptops and checking their own voice mail, secretaries have been relieved of some of their time-consuming clerical duties and are available to tackle other tasks ....In most cases, however, the authority given to secretaries has lagged behind that of the former managers, whose duties they are assuming. So have their salary levels: the average pay of secretaries is about $8,000 a year less than the average pay for white-collar workers in private industry. But over the last five years, the gap has closed slightly. From 1982 to 1996, the national average for secretarial salaries rose 14 percent, to $24,200, according to Watson Wyatt & Company, a human resources consulting group based in New York, while white-collar wages as a whole climbed 11 percent to $33,100, according to BLS ....(New York Times, Jan. 26, page F14). The Federal Reserve releases updated measures of industrial output, capacity, and factory use rates, showing that the manufacturing sector, as expected, advanced at a slower pace in 1996 than originally estimated ....(Daily Labor Report, page D-1)_____The nation's industrial output grew a little more slowly than previously thought over the past 20 years, and inflation pressures were slightly more muted. The conclusions came from part of an overhaul of the method to calculate output (Washington Times, page B6).
