BLS Daily Report

[Richardson_D <Richardson_D@xxxxxxx>]

BLS DAILY REPORT, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2000:

On its Web site, the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers kid-oriented
statistics on a variety of professions, including "rock star," says the
"Work Week" column of The Wall Street Journal in its end "The Checkoff"
paragraph.

The durability of the recent productivity surge will help ensure that the
U.S. economy stays on a steady path of solid expansion without threat of
inflation heating up and ending the longest period of growth in the nation's
history, a Federal Reserve official and leading business economists say
during the first day of the National Association for Business Economics'
annual meeting in Chicago.  In large part, the productivity gains of the
last few years have been linked to the tight labor market, as businesses
have resorted to greater capital investment to achieve efficiencies, the
economists say.  If and when overall economic growth slows to the point
where labor market tightness eases, productivity growth might ebb, some
analysts suggest. Government figures recently released showed that labor
productivity-- output per hour worked -- climbed by an annual rate of 5.7
percent during the second quarter of this year among nonfarm businesses, a
surge that surprised even the most optimistic forecasters.  Although hourly
compensation gains accelerated, the productivity rise pushed down unit labor
costs, which posted a 0.4 percent decline in the second quarter. Assessing
the impact of the Fed's six interest rate hikes between June 1999 and May
2000, the NABE forecast panel of 30 economists concluded that the central
bank "is pretty much finished" doing what it needed to do to cool the
expansion from what generally was regarded as red-hot growth through late
1999, says the chief economist at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, who presented
the group's latest forecast (Daily Labor Report, page A-10).

Large tech companies are forging bonds with schools that go far beyond
donating computers and showing up on Career Day, says The Washington Post
(page A14).  Increasingly, companies are taking an aggressive role in
creating a curriculum, training teachers and developing materials that
school administrators can take to their school boards to get the courses
approved for credit. The companies say everyone benefits.  Students get
training in skills vital in the new economy; schools get a cutting-edge
technology education program at minimal expense; and the tech businesses
stand to gain workers at a time when the industry has hundreds of thousands
of job openings.  But some educators are wary of the trend, saying that
narrow, employer-designed courses might be inconsistent with a high school's
mission to provide students with a balanced curriculum.  Industry
projections from April on the number of additional workers needed in
information technology over the next 12 months nationwide, and the numbers
of jobs unfilled according to the Information Technology Association of
America, based on the association's survey of hiring managers at 700
companies, are included in a table.

An article by Norman Matloff, professor of computer science at the
University of California, Davis, says that computer industry CEOs, claiming
desperate labor shortage, are pressuring Congress to raise the quota for the
H-1B work visa, under which tends of thousands of foreign-national computer
professionals are brought to work in the United States.  While the industry
denies its motivation is the hiring of cheap foreign labor, the facts say
otherwise.  In spite of the fact that university computer science enrollment
has doubled in the past few years, fewer than half of the computer science
graduates are being offered programming positions.  And it is worse for the
older programmers.  Surveys of high-tech hiring managers have revealed that
only 2 percent of them seek workers having more than 10 years of experience,
and only 13 percent of managers under 30 had hired anyone over age 40 in the
past year.  Most of the older ones leave the field when they cannot find
programming jobs.  Industry lobbyists cite low unemployment rates for
programmers, but these ex-programmers do not show up in those statistics
(The Washington Post, page A35).

<<application/ms-tnef>>