U.S., too broke to cook the numbers
------------------------------
U.S. drops report on mass layoffs
Washington Post
Published Jan. 3, 2003 LABO03
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Citing a shortage of money, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will stop publishing information about factory closings across the country, a decision that some state officials and labor leaders are protesting.
The monthly Labor Department analysis, known as the Mass Layoffs Statistics report, detailed where workplaces with more than 50 employees closed and what kinds of workers were affected.
"We have finite resources," said Mason Bishop, deputy assistant secretary for the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration, which has been paying about $6.6 million a year for the report.
The department made the announcement Dec. 24, as a note on its November -- and final -- report.
The report said employers initiated 2,150 mass layoffs in November, with workers in manufacturing most affected. About 240,000 workers lost their jobs, it said.
Bishop said that the Labor Department had only $30 million for its dislocated-worker demonstration project and that it no longer could afford the report. "We believe we need to be funding programs that get people back to work," he said.
Some state officials, who help compile data for the report, criticized the decision. They said the monthly reports helped them steer unemployed people to jobs in new industries.
"In the current recession, [the] data have increased in value and are being followed and evaluated more closely," Catherine Leapheart, president of the National Association of State Work Force Agencies, wrote in a letter to Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. "The states have come to rely on this information as an economic indicator and a tool for operational decisions on service delivery and funding allocations for dislocated-worker programs."
State officials nationwide said they were surprised and unhappy to hear the report was canceled.
"In these times when the economy is in transition, knowing what's going on and who it's going on to is critical," said Harry Payne, chairman of the North Carolina Employment Security Commission. "It's an axiom of human nature that you focus on what you can measure. Now they are taking away a measure."
Payne said North Carolina has been hit hard by plant closings, including those by textile and fiber-optics companies that have moved jobs overseas. He said the program was the only national, standardized source of data tracking plant closings, allowing states to compare their manufacturing layoffs with those of other states.
"To give it up is just awful," said Beverly Gumola of the Illinois Department of Employment Security. State officials use the data to determine "which occupations are going kaput," she said.
Christine Owens, director of public policy for the AFL-CIO, whose member unions have been hit hard by the loss of manufacturing jobs, said eliminating the report is an example of a "let-them-eat-cake approach" by the Bush administration. |
