[PEN-L:533] BLS Daily Report

[Richardson_D]

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For you academic types, note the item below about bonuses.  BLS is
paying bonuses of $2,000 to $4,000 for bachelors level economists.  Any
good, preferably progressive, economists are welcome.  Please respond to
me for details.

Dave

-----------

BLS DAILY REPORT, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 1998

The hot job market may melt teens' plans for college, says a Wall Street
Journal article (page A2)....  In a strong economy, with a drum-tight
labor market, many teens have more job options than they have had since
any other time in recent memory.  High-schoolers are taking on the air
of more experienced job seekers -- playing one offer off against the
next and boosting their pay in the process.  For teenagers, the
abundance of good jobs is great news.  But to some educators, who want
more high-school graduates to go on to college so they can fuel the
sophisticated work force of the future, the phenomenon has a potentially
negative side-effect:  Fewer kids may choose to attend college....  In
May, the jobless rate for high-school graduates who have no college
education declined to 3.7 percent, the lowest since the Labor Department
began tracking this data in 1992....  

The Labor Department is offering a worksite safety guide for employers
and a hot line for teens in hopes of continuing a recent downturn in
teenagers' job-related injuries, which have declined from 5.8 injuries
per 100 workers in 1992 to 4.8 injuries per 100 workers in 1997....
(Daily Labor Report, page A-2).

Wholesaler inventories unexpectedly declined in April for the first time
in three months, and sales rose, the Commerce Department said,
suggesting the record pace of stockpiling during the first quarter is
starting to slow....  (Washington Post, page C14; Wall Street Journal,
page A2). 

A surge in merger-related layoffs in the past two months could
foreshadow an economic slowdown, according to a report issued by
Challenger, Gray and Christmas.  More than 16,000 job cuts related to
mergers and acquisitions were announced in April and May, reversing last
year's worker-hoarding trend, the international outplacement firm said
(Washington Post, page C14). 

World oil demand is growing more slowly than expected as Asia's
year-long economic crisis reduces the region's once robust thirst for
energy and producers struggle to cut output, the International Energy
Agency said....  (Washington Post, page C14).

A signing bonus is now a fixture farther down the job ladder, says an
article by Louis Uchitelle in the New York Times (page A1)....  The
signing bonus is proliferating in America, and growing ever larger as
employers bid for scarce workers.  A recruiting tool that had been
limited to upper level managers, highly skilled technicians, and
athletes, it is spreading today to many others, even civil servants.
The Labor Department, for example, is for the first time offering a
bonus of up to $4,000 to attract young economists.  The hiring bonus
appears to be flourishing because employers, faced with the lowest
unemployment rate in a quarter-century, have shifted some of the
bargaining from wages to the less costly one-time payments.  And job
applicants, accepting the shift, often welcome the bonus as a windfall
to pay off accumulated debt, or as a measure of their value -- and
status -- in the eyes of their new employers....  The American
Management Association, in a new survey of its corporate members, found
that 44 percent of the 344 who replied paid signing bonuses to employees
hired in the last year, up from 30 percent last spring....  For all its
growing popularity, the signing bonus is hard for the federal government
to track and is not calculated as part of the ECI.  The index converts
the various forms of income and benefits into pay per hour.  For the
bonus, however, that cannot be easily done, officials explain, because
it has already been paid by the time a new employee starts working.
That means people have more spending money than the income statistics
suggest.  In addition, labor costs may be putting greater pressure on
companies to raise prices than the ECI now indicates....  The bonus is
spreading, for the first time, to the public sector.  BLS has just
started to use it, as has the Census Bureau.  An act of Congress is
required to raise Civil Service pay scales, but bonuses are legal under
a rarely invoked provision in the law.  In recent months, BLS has paid
bonuses of $2,000 to $4,000 to nine newly hired employees, seven of them
economists.  "I hired one guy and there was a competing bonus from
another agency," said Michael Allen, a personnel specialist at the
bureau.  "The compensation packages were basically equal and he wanted
to work with us, but without the bonus he would not have accepted"....


A popular view is that wives are working more to compensate for their
husbands' flagging earnings and shore up family incomes, says Business
Week (June 15, page 30).  It ain't necessarily so, contend economist
Chinhui Juhn of the University of Houston and Kevin M. Murphy of the
University of Chicago.  Their research shows that it's the wives of
middle- and high-wage men who have posted the heftiest increases in
employment in recent decades -- even though low-wage men have suffered
the largest drops in earnings and employment....  How can these diverse
trends be explained:  The thesis that married women were working more in
order to maintain household incomes seems most applicable to women with
husbands in the middle earnings range, says Juhn.  Real wages for men in
this group were stagnant in the 1970s and 1980s....  Wives of
high-earning men tend to be highly educated; growing demand and rising
wages for high-skilled workers of both genders are the likely factor
luring them into the job market.  As for women married to low-wage men,
the data show that their increased earnings did partly offset the sharp
declines in their husbands' pay, suggesting that they would have liked
to work even more.  But the researchers theorize that the same demand
shift toward high-skilled workers that hurt low-wage men also hurt their
wives.  In sum, shifting opportunities for women of varying skill levels
explain a lot more about their labor market participation than do their
husbands' wages. 

Liberal arts and tech majors both regret study choices, says an article
in the Washington Times (page B10).  The grass often seems greener on
the other side of the computer screen, according to a new survey of
college graduates.  Nearly half (43 percent) of the college-educated
workers questioned said they would choose a different major if they
could start over -- with many favoring science or technology for the
second time around.  However, about 40 percent of the respondents now
working in the high-tech information industry would also pick a
different course of study -- with liberal arts or education being the
most popular choices....  The telephone survey of 400 college-educated
workers aged 30 to 55 was conducted by Market Research Institute and
co-sponsored by George Mason University and Potomac KnowledgeWay.  The
respondents were all employed and had been out of college for at least
10 years....  The study showed a mobile work force, with 51 percent of
the workers saying they had already switched careers at least once since
graduating from college.  Within careers, respondents had held an
average of four jobs since entering the work force.  The researchers
found that information technology workers are considerably more restless
than the average employee.  A third of the high-tech workers expect to
make a future career change, compared with one in five of all college
graduates....  The desire of technical workers for a broader education
and of other grads for more technical training indicates that colleges
need to increase interaction between fields of study....     

A study of post-retirement medical benefits offered by nearly 300 U.S.
companies reveals that most employers were able to cut their plan
expenses over the last year....  The human resources consulting firm of
William M. Mercer Inc. said the savings can be attributed to several
factors, including the growing popularity of managed care plans.  But
the savings are also a function of the broader trend toward retirees
sharing plan costs with employers....  (Daily Labor Report, page A-11). 

DUE OUT TOMORROW:  U.S. Import and Export Price Indexes -- May 1998


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