BLS DAILY REPORT, FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 1997 New claims for unemployment insurance benefits decreased by 8,000 to a seasonally adjusted total of 324,000, according to the Employment and Training Administration of the Department of Labor ....(Daily Labor Report, page D-1)_____The Washington Post (page D2) points out that the drop occurred despite auto plant strikes that have idled thousands of workers_____The Wall Street Journal (page A6) says it was the first drop after three weeks of increases, indicating that speculation of labor market softening may have been premature. Expressing their concern that a change could be agreed to in secret budget talks, 45 House members sent a letter to House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich (R-Ohio) and Ranking Minority Member John Spratt (D-SC) asking for a separate vote on any provision that would adjust the use of the CPI in cost-of-living formulas used to escalate federal benefits, pensions, and personal tax brackets ....Members writing the letter said they support House Res. 93, introduced March 12, which says that the BLS alone is responsible for any changes in the CPI. That resolution was sponsored by Reps. Jon Fox (R-Pa), Carolyn Maloney (D-NJ), Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass), and Phil English (R-Pa) ....(Daily Labor Report, page A-9). Help-wanted ads declined in March. The Conference Board Index dipped 2 percentage points to 87 percent of its 1987 base, the New York-based research organization says. Help-wanted ads in 1995, 1996, and the first quarter of 1997 have usually remained in the 85 percent to 90 percent range, demonstrating a steady period of job growth, analysts at the Conference Board say ....(Daily Labor Report, page A-8). A report released by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Studies bolsters evidence of a positive link between higher education and training with increased productivity, higher rates of employment, and higher paying jobs for Americans. According to Education and the Economy: An Indicators Report, college graduates earn 50 percent more than high school graduates, and workers who receive training in their current job earn more than workers who do not ....(Daily Labor Report, page A-14). A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal, "When Fed Governor Talks, People Listen; But Do They Hear?," says that the propose of a recent speech by Laurence H. Meyer was to explain why the Fed raised interest rates last month, to make sure his comments weren't interpreted as a prediction about the Fed's next move, and to avoid moving the market. But then came the wire-service headlines ...."They're not reporting what I said, but overinterpreting it," he said, as he read the reports ....Fed old-timers say the environment is radically different today. "The intense, second-to-second competition of the wire services wasn't there 10 years ago," says the Fed's veteran spokesman, Joseph R. Coyne. "There is an attempt to be creative in interpreting speeches so you don't say what everybody else says" ..... A processing error made on data collected in December 1996 led to a significant over-estimation of increases in Canada's national employment level, Statistics Canada said. The error in interpreting results from the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours resulted from the on-going transition in the collection of data on employment, earnings, and hours worked to using employers' administrative records from the current practice of requiring responses to a monthly survey. The last of three phases in the transition is scheduled for May 1997, but one of the changes scheduled for the last phase was inadvertently implemented in December. The result was to artificially distort the movement from November to December, and that was carried over to the results for January ....The employment increases in December and January were the subject of some controversy as they were significantly higher than the estimates of new jobs developed through the Labour Force Survey ....Discovery of the miscalculation forced Statistics Canada to delay the scheduled April 23 release of the February employment, earnings, and hours data to May 6 (Daily Labor Report, page A-12).
