February 2002, Vol. 125, No. 2
Labor month in review
The February Review
More mass layoffs in 2001
Union membership rate steady in 2001
The official first year of the 21st century was remarkably difficult. The end of the first quarter marked the end of a record-setting economic expansion. September witnessed a series of terrorist attacks that deepened and accentuated the ensuing recession. By the fourth quarter, the unemployment rate was higher than it had been in more than 7 years. At the time this is being written, payroll employment had continued to fall and job losses over the period since March 2001 totaled 1.4 million.
David S. Langdon, Terence M. McMenamin, and Thomas J. Krolik report more completely on the labor market in 2001. They find employment declining in a wide range of industries, earnings growth slowing in most occupations, and joblessness rising for all major demographic groups. One particularly important development they note was the relatively small share of job loss accounted for by workers on temporary layoffs and the continued increase in the share accounted for by permanent separations.
The remaining three articles discuss time use surveys. Such surveys both supplement our knowledge of the hours spent at work and provide complementary information about how the rest of our time is spent. Lisa K. Schwartz leads with an account of the Bureau of Labor Statistics testing the instruments and methods proposed for the forthcoming American Time Use Survey. Such testing and improvement has become a much more important part of survey design and helps avoid such problems as ambiguous wording and awkward interview procedures.
Anne Winkler and Lisa Schwartz, Diane Herz, and Harley Frazis exchange views on a specific issue in the design of the American Time Use Survey—the use of "stylized" questions to measure intrahousehold allocations of time. Winkler notes that the proposed survey focuses exclusively on the single member of a household that is the selected respondent to the survey. As a result, the survey cannot provide information on how household members divide the time they spend on household tasks. Winkler goes on to suggest that devising questions to obtain this information with sufficient accuracy from a single respondent within the household is one approach to the problem.
Schwartz, Herz, and Frazis, while agreeing that intrahousehold time allocation is an important and desirable datum, point out that devising the instrumentation and procedure needed to measure it well is not an easy task. Indeed, they conclude, "[T]hese measures may be difficult to capture with the present structure of the American Time Use Survey within reasonable budgetary and data quality constraints."
Readers should note that Professor Winkler was afforded opportunities to see the remarks by Schwartz et al prior to publication. As a result, many minor inconsistencies were avoided and the papers were able to focus on the major issue. However, the descriptions of the current survey provided by Schwartz and her colleagues should be regarded as the view of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Bureau, they also note, is continuing to explore methods for measuring the intrahousehold allocation of time.
During 2001, 21,345 layoff events occurred in the Nation, resulting in 2,496,784 initial claims filings for unemployment insurance. Both the number of events and the number of initial claimants were the highest in the nearly 7-year history of the program.
Manufacturing accounted for 42 percent of all mass layoff events and 49 percent of initial claims filed during 2001, the largest annual shares to date. Initial claim filings were most numerous in transportation equipment (256,703), followed by electronic and other electrical equipment (167,125) and industrial machinery, and equipment (146,265).
The number of initial claims filed in 2001 due to mass layoffs was higher in the Midwest (841,597) than any other region. Layoffs in transportation equipment, industrial machinery and equipment, and electronic and other electrical equipment accounted for 39 percent of the claims in the Midwest. The fewest number of mass-layoff initial claims was reported in the Northeast region (340,246). For more information, see "Mass Layoffs in December 2001" (news release USDL 02–44) and this issue’s lead article on employment and unemployment trends.
Union membership rate steady in 2001
In 2001, 13.5 percent of wage and salary workers were union members, unchanged from 2000. The union membership rate has fallen from a high of 20.1 percent in 1983, the first year for which comparable union data are available.
In both 2001 and 2000, about 16.3 million wage and salary workers were union members. Nearly 4 in 10 government workers were union members in 2001, compared with less than 1 in 10 private wage and salary workers. Protective service workers, a group that includes police officers and firefighters, had the highest unionization rate among all occupations, at 38 percent. More information is found in "Union Members in 2001," news release USDL 02–28.
Communications regarding the Monthly Labor Review may be sent to the Editor-in-Chief by e-mail to mlr@bls.gov, by mail at 2 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Room 2850, Washington, DC, 20212, or by fax to (202) 691–7890.
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