BUSH ADMINISTRATION ONCE AGAIN TRYING TO MAKING A SHAM OUT OF ANY LABOR STATS.......
and to of course INVENT MORE JOBS THAT LOOK GOOD ON PAPER
Should burger-flipping be a heavy industry?
David Cay Johnston NYT
Saturday, February 21, 2004
U.S. report seeks label for fast-food jobs
>b> Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and
ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling
automobiles?
That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the
President, a thick annual compendium of observations and
statistics on the health of the U.S. economy.
The latest edition, which was sent to Congress last week,
questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be
counted as part of the service sector or should instead be
reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered.
N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of
Economic Advisers, which compiled the report, did not respond
Thursday to a request for an interview.
The White House press office also had no comment.
Putting jobs at McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food
enterprises in the same category as those at industrial companies
like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a
stretch, akin to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a
vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981 federal regulatory
proposal.
But the presidential report points out that the current system for
classifying jobs "is not straightforward."
The White House considered this section of the report to be
important enough to have a box drawn around it so that it would
stand out among the report's 417 pages of dry statistical tables
and text.
"When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it
providing a 'service' or is it combining inputs to 'manufacture' a
product?" the report asks.
"Sometimes, seemingly subtle differences can determine whether
an industry is classified as manufacturing. For example, mixing
water and concentrate to produce soft drinks is classified as
manufacturing. However, if that activity is performed at a snack
bar, it is considered a service."
The report notes that the Census Bureau's North American
Industry Classification System defines manufacturing as covering
enterprises that are "engaged in the mechanical, physical or
chemical transformation of materials, substances or components
into new products."
Classifications matter, the report says, because among other
things, they can affect which businesses receive tax relief.
"Suppose it was decided to offer tax relief to manufacturing firms,"
the report said. "Because the manufacturing category is not well
defined, firms would have an incentive to characterize themselves
as in manufacturing.
Administering the tax relief could be difficult, and the tax relief may
not extend to the companies for which it was enacted."
David Huether, chief economist for the National Association of
Manufacturers, said that he had heard for several years that some
economists wanted to count hamburger flipping as a manufacturing
job, which he noted would result in statistical reports showing
many more jobs in what has been a declining sector of the
economy.
"The question is: If you heat the hamburger up are you chemically
transforming it?" Huether said.
His answer? No.
The New York Times |
