BLS DAILY REPORT, TUESDAY, MAY 27, 1997 The third quarter of 1997 should have the most robust hiring since 1988, according to the results of a Manpower, Inc., survey of 16,000 businesses. The survey finds that 30 percent of respondents will be searching for additional workers this summer, while only 5 percent plan staff cutbacks. "Much of the present demand is for seasonal workers in such industries as construction and services, but the need for workers is so widespread that there seems to be a carryover demand caused by the inability of companies to find the people they need in earlier quarters," says the president of Manpower ....(May 27: Daily Labor Report, page A-1; Washington Post, page E1; New York Times, page D4; Wall Street Journal, page A4). Netscape Communications Corp. and other high-technology companies plan to propose a global standard for protecting the privacy of World Wide Web users without compromising the ability of marketers to target them, says an Associated Press article in The Washington Post (page E1). The companies planned to announced today a common format that would enable Web surfers to block out personal information that their desktop computers automatically send to Web site operators. Netscape and two other Internet software companies, Firefly Network, Inc. and VeriSign Inc. said they would submit their proposal this week to the Worldwide Web Consortium, which sets Internet standards About 60 other high tech companies were listed as supporters of the standard ....(Washington Post, May 27, page E1; New York Times, May 26, page D3). The Washington Post carried a two-part article entitled "City on the Rebound" on page A1 (May 25 and 26) that says New York City is benefiting from money, immigration, and an ebbing crime rate ....At the end of the 20th century, New York is soaking up immigrants at nearly the same torrid pace as at the beginning of the century, says the Post. And the city is thriving, in large measure, because hundreds of thousands of these new New Yorkers are reenacting grandpa's elbow-grease story ....An annual infusion of 113,000 immigrants is more than making up for the enervating drip of residents to the suburbs and elsewhere .... The gap between the national unemployment rate, at 4.9 percent in April, and New York City's, at 9.7 percent, is now the greatest it has been in the 30 years extensive records have been kept, federal labor officials said (New York Times, May 24, page 11) ....The causes of locally high unemployment are familiar: declines in manufacturing, the influx of immigrants, the creation of highly paid jobs that don't affect average New Yorkers, and the welfare overhaul that is encouraging people to leave public aid have all contributed. The city is creating more jobs than it has for years, though not enough ....Some economists believe that, as the national labor market continues to tighten in Sun Belt meccas, a new equilibrium could be reached that will tilt gradually back toward New York's advantage, or at least toward a level playing field. If employers can't find workers elsewhere, so this reasoning goes, they may be drawn to move to or expand in the city and the region, because that is where the labor is ....The labor pool is enormous. In March, nearly 5 percent of all the unemployed people in the country lived in the New York metropolitan area, a higher proportion of the country's jobless than in any single month since at least 1987, according to BLS. And that figure does not include the hundreds of thousands of residents of the region who have moved out in the 1990s, looking for greener pastures elsewhere ....Other experts are less optimistic about the labor gap, arguing that the kinds of companies most likely to hire New York's unemployed are retailers or hotels that don't choose locations based on labor availability, but rather on market demand .... "Immigrants and the Economy" is the title of an editorial in The New York Times (May 27) which contends that the "presence of immigrants in the work force is raising the living standards of most Americans by a small amount. That reassuring conclusion comes from a panel of scholars convened by the National Research Council. But job competition from immigrants depresses the wages of some low-paid native workers by a small amount, and immigrants impose sizable, though remediable, burdens on taxpayers in heavily hit states" ....The panel did not make policy recommendations, says The Times, but its careful analysis suggests how Congress could tailor the composition of immigrants to minimize the strains on taxpayers and the burdens on poor native workers. Sunday's Washington Post included a consumer's guide to GDP, CPI, PPI, ECI, and other vital signs of growth and inflation in an article, "Knowing the Numbers, Knowing the Economy" by John M. Berry (page H1). Berry writes that there are some key statistics that do provide solid information about the fundamental shape of the economy, though on occasion they may be subject to the noise problem. He says that, currently, "the two numbers that best identify the happy state of the economy are the nation's 4.9 percent unemployment rate and the 2.5 percent rise in consumer prices over the last 12 months. The sum of the two, which some economists call the `misery' rate, hasn't been lower in 30 years" .... The "Washington Business" section of the Washington Post (May 26, page 10) carries a story on the temporary-help industry in the greater Washington area, using anecdotes and a graph whose data is attributed to BLS. The graph shows that the number of temporary workers has grown more than 400 percent since 1982 .... Despite the nation's current economic strength, most states won't generate enough low-skilled employment to absorb the welfare recipients expected to need work this year and in 1998, according to a forthcoming study by Regional Financial Associates. Just 13 states, led by fast-growing Nevada, will provide sufficient jobs to meet projected employment requirements imposed by welfare reform, while 21 states, including New York and California, are expected to generate less than half the needed positions, concludes the West Chester, Pa., economic consulting firm ....(Wall Street Journal, May 27, page A9A). A majority of mid-sized and large U.S. companies engage in some form of workplace monitoring and surveillance practices, finds the American Management Association in a survey of 906 firms. More than one-third (35 percent) record their employees' telephone calls or voice mail, check their computer files and electronic mail, or videotape their work. An even larger share of companies (37 percent) monitor the telephone numbers that employees call and also keep track of the duration of the conversations, even though the employers do not actively engage in surveillance of the calls. Among the respondents, 34 percent videotape work spaces to counter theft, violence, or sabotage, but not specifically to monitor employee performance, according to the survey ....While most companies notify employees of their monitoring and surveillance policies, up to 23 percent of those practicing such policies reported that they do not ....Constant coverage of all employees is relatively rare, however, because the scope and frequency of companies' monitoring and surveillance vary widely ....(Daily Labor Report, May 27, page A-8). DUE OUT TOMORROW: State and Metropolitan Area Employment and Unemployment: April 1997
