2nd item. While ATT conducted a major down sizing this year, it has
now hired enough people so that employment over the year is unchanged.
This reminds me of the perennial story of the guy who was downsized
out and then offered his old job back as a temp, i.e. without
benefits. My hazy memory recalls that he worked for ATT in Basking
Ridge. Does anyone have solid information on the down sizing-rehiring
phenemenon?
Dave
----------
BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, DECEMBER 30, 1996
Outgoing Labor Secretary Robert Reich agreed Sunday on ABC's This Week
that the consumer price index should be revised, but warned that any
changes should be made for technical, not political reasons
....Earlier in the program, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New
York Democrat, said President Clinton should either call for a
revision of the CPI in the budget or say he is open to discussion with
the chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees ....(USA Today,
page 1B; Reuter story).
AT&T will end 1996 with roughly the same number of workers as it
started, despite high profile downsizing moves. The firm, which is
now solely in communication services, did cut about 7,700 jobs, but
they were mostly offset by new hiring ....(Wall Street Journal, page
A3).
Higher education is no longer a luxury. To get a decent-paying job, a
young worker needs at least a couple of years of college. But its
cost is rising at an alarming pace. The GAO says public four-year
colleges raised tuition 256 percent between 1980 and 1995, far
outstripping an 85 percent increase in consumer prices and a 93
percent rise in the typical family's income. So, it is no surprise
that politicians from both parties want to make college easier to
afford ....Using Census Bureau data, Harvard economist Thomas Kane
figures an 18- or 19-year-old from a family with income in the top 25
percent is three times as likely to be in college as one from the
bottom 25 percent. And the disparity is widening ....Kane's research
suggests that low income youths are particularly sensitive to tuition
increases at public colleges, which enroll 80 percent of the nation's
college students ....("The Outlook," Wall Street Journal, page A1).
The dollar's rise against the yen is making the U.S. a less attractive
place for Japanese manufacturers to produce their goods. It is also
making U.S. exporters nervous as their wares become more expensive
overseas ....(Wall Street Journal, page A2).
A snapshot of the government's downsizing shows that the
administration should have few, if any, problems in reaching a
statutory requirement to cut 272,900 federal jobs by 1999. New
figures from OPM show that 254,824 federal employees left the
government between January 1993 and September 1996, a decline of 11.6
percent ....The OPM figures are essentially a head count -- they
represent on-board employees and include all work schedules, such as
full time, part time, and intermittent. The numbers are not used to
prepare the president's budget, which measures federal workers through
"full-time equivalents," a tally that allows for two or three
part-time jobs to be combined and counted as one full-time position.
The bulk of the downsizing has come at the Defense Department ....Job
cuts at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Resolution Trust
Corp. also have fueled the downsizing ....("The Federal Page,"
Washington Post, page A9).
DUE OUT TOMORROW: 1997 Release Schedule for Bureau of Labor
Statistics Major Economic Indicators
