Constantly....what planet are YOU on?.....several small and precise strikes compared to A WAR BASED ON LIES?.....when will you live in the present???? next you'll be back like the rest of the dogs of war here talking about FDR and WWII.......what a joke.....meanwhile in THE PRESENT AND HERE AT HOME...MORE DISASTEROUS ECONOMIC JOB LOSSES....you remember the REAL problems of the US don't you?
134,000 Lost Jobs in August 'Mass Layoffs'
By Kirstin Downey
The Washington Post
Friday 26 September 2003
More U.S. workers lost their jobs in large layoffs in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported
yesterday, another sign that employers are continuing to trim payrolls even as the economy
strengthens.
The BLS tracks what it calls "mass layoffs," or firings of more than 50 workers in a single month by a
single employer, by compiling reports on initial claims for unemployment benefits filed with state
agencies. The numbers include temporary and permanent firings.
About 134,000 workers lost their jobs in 1,258 mass layoffs nationwide last month, up from the
128,103 employees who were fired in 1,248 such actions in August 2002, the bureau said.
The mass-layoff report is a snapshot of monthly employment changes across the country.
Manufacturing took the hardest hit of any sector in August, accounting for nearly a third of all mass
layoffs and more than a third of the number of workers who lost jobs, the report said. Job losses were
also reported in transportation equipment, textile mills, machinery and food manufacturing.
California, New York, Illinois, North Carolina and Texas had the most mass layoffs, the report said.
The numbers of people losing jobs in mass layoffs increased most in textile mills and in the motion
picture and sound recording industries.
Lewis Siegal, a BLS senior economist, said the overall numbers are not as bleak as they appear,
because in many cases they do not represent "long-term layoffs." He said that 7 percent of the claims,
for example, occurred in temporary-help services, and those jobs are, by definition, short-lived. And
employment in some industries, such as movies and recording, fluctuates according to production
schedules.
But some economists say many manufacturing jobs, such as those formerly held by textile-mill
workers in North Carolina, are probably gone for good.
"We've got a sort of despair," said Harry E. Payne Jr., chairman of the North Carolina Employment
Security Commission. "Whatever resources the state has in terms of being able to help people are
being greatly taxed."
In Southern California, motion-picture industry employment is steadily eroding, said Bradley Kemp, a
state labor analyst. Since May 1999, employment in that sector has fallen from 155,000 jobs in that
region to about 114,200. Many jobs were moved to Canada and elsewhere as movie-production
companies seek to work in areas with lower prevailing wages.
Illinois had 50 mass layoffs in August, according to the BLS. Brenda A. Russell, director of the Illinois
Department of Employment Security, said the state has lost manufacturing and wholesaling jobs, and
is developing an economic development network statewide that it hopes will create a system to alert
officials of impending plant cutbacks and closings.
One of the mass layoffs in Illinois involved Tellabs, a Naperville-based telecommunications equipment
company that announced in August that it was laying off 325 workers at its only U.S. manufacturing
plant. Tellabs is outsourcing the work to another company, which will move almost all the jobs to
Guadalajara, Mexico. Tellabs cut its workforce from 8,900 in April 2001 to 3,825.
"This reduction is to help keep our expenses in line with the fall of sales," said George Stenitzer, a
company spokesman. He said the company had managed to maintain a U.S. manufacturing workforce
longer than its competitors, including Lucent Technologies, Cisco and Nortel, which he said began
outsourcing their labor to other countries years ago. |
