September, 2001, Vol. 124, No. 9
Labor month in review
The September
Review
Effects of events of September 11
Women narrow earnings gap by degrees
Midwesterners most likely to have job
The Employment Cost Index (ECI) is one of several important Bureau of Labor Statistics measures of what can be termed business costs. That is, as John W. Ruser points out in his article, it is "an indicator of cost pressures within companies that could lead to price inflation for finished goods and service." The article goes on to describe the wage and salary payments and the wide range of benefit costs counted, the raw data collection process, and the statistical calculations underlying the index. It also includes analyses of the index’s behavior over the business cycle and other characteristics of the data series.
Jane Waldfogel submits a careful analysis of two surveys conducted for the Department of Labor on the impacts of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA). She reports, among other findings of the survey, that about 16 percent of employees took leave for family or medical reasons in 2000, and that only about 10 percent of employers perceived a noticeable negative impact of the program on business profitability or growth.
R. Jason Faberman takes advantage of the Longitudinal Database (LDB), a relatively new tool developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, to investigate the dynamics of employment in the Baltimore and Washington metropolitan areas. The LDB contains quarterly employment and wage data for nearly all establishments in the United States. The comprehensive coverage of the database allowed Faberman to focus on two metropolitan areas and the longitudinal nature of the files allowed him to decompose job flows into their component parts. By using these characteristics of the data, he is able to conclude, "These findings shed an intriguing new light on the employment dynamics observed within metropolitan areas: not only is job growth higher in the suburbs, but job turnover is as well."
Effects of events of September 11
The events of September 11, 2001, resulted in a tragic loss of life and significant disruptions to workers in the local affected economies. In Lower Manhattan, about 368,000 persons worked within a few blocks of the World Trade Center, more than a half-million worked within the area cordoned off by emergency officials as they responded to the attack, and about 700,000 in a slightly larger area of the southern quarter of the island.
The immediate statistical impact of this attack, however, was small relative to the number of people who were affected. In the Current Employment Statistics survey of establishments, the reference period is the pay period including the 12th of the month. Workers employed for any portion are counted as employed. Nearly all pay periods including the 12th began prior to the day of the attack. Thus, it is likely that the events of September 11 had little effect on September’s overall employment count.
To the extent that potential jobseekers were unable or unwilling to search for work in the aftermath of the events of September 11, unemployment estimates could have been affected in the Current Population Survey of households. Because the reference period for job search is any time during the 4 weeks ending September 15, however, the effect on unemployment appears to have been limited.
The employment and unemployment effects of the September 11 attacks are more likely to begin to register by the time data for October become available in November. We cannot be sure, however, that we will be able to completely disentangle these effects from other influences in the economy. Additional information and links to program-specific fact sheets can be found at: http://www.bls.gov/bls/peoplebox.htm
Women narrow earnings gap by degrees
At all levels of education, women fared better than men did with respect to earnings growth between 1979 and 2000. Earnings for women with college degrees have increased 30.4 percent since 1979 on an inflation-adjusted basis, while those of male college graduates rose only 16.7 percent.
Inflation-adjusted earnings for women with a high school diploma advanced 2.9 percent between 1979 and 2000, while earnings for male high school graduates fell 12.9 percent. Among those with some college or an associate degree, women’s earnings were up 8.2 percent, while men’s were down 4.1 percent.
Although both women and men without a high school diploma have experienced a decline in inflation-adjusted earnings since 1979, women’s earnings fell significantly less—a drop of 9.8 percent, compared with a 26.7-percent drop for men. More information can be found in Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2000, BLS Report 952.
Midwesterners most likely to have job
The proportion of the population with jobs was the highest in the Midwest in 1999. Among Midwesterners, 67.3 percent of the population was employed on average in 1999. The percentages for the other three regions were clustered within a narrow range: 64.3 percent of those in the West were employed, 63.2 percent in the South, and 62.5 percent in the Northeast. In the Nation as a whole, 64.3 percent of the population had jobs. Additional information is available from Geographic Profile of Employment and Unemployment, 1999 (BLS Bulletin 2537).
Communications regarding the Monthly Labor Review may be sent to the Editor-in-Chief at 2 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Room 2850, Washington, DC, 20212, or faxed to (202) 691–7890.
Within Monthly Labor Review Online:
Welcome | Current
Issue | Index | Subscribe
| Archives
Exit Monthly Labor Review Online:
BLS Home | Publications & Research
Papers
