The Economics Section - Page A4
August 23, 1996 Clinton Administration Lost 3.9 Million Jobs
by Staff Government Writers, The Daily Republican NewspaperSACRAMENTO DESK - The nation's economy is sluggish with jobs and productivity in a steady state of long-term decline according to the Clinton administration's labor department report released Thursday.
John Taylor, a Stanford University economist and a chief Dole economic adviser said "The job-loss rate is high for this stage of a recovery. It is hard to see any of the improvement that the [Clinton] administration claims. Job insecurity is still widespread."
The labor department reported Thursday that a total of 8.4 million people were pushed out of their jobs involuntarily from 1993 through 1995. That represented one out of every 14 job holders, compared with one out of 12 in the early 1990s.
Of those Americans who have lost their jobs since Clinton was elected in 1992, only 33 percent found work but have not earned as much or more than they had before.
"You still have many layoffs," said Thomas Nardone, a supervising economist at the labor department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, "and if you lose your job, most people don't end up in situations that are as good in terms of earnings as the jobs they lost."
The labor department survey shows a work force still suffering from job downsizing and wage stagnation. However, the Clinton administration cited the survey as evidence that "times are better."
There have been 8.4 million jobs eliminated in the Clinton administration's economy. That represents a decline of 16 percent from the 9 million lost in the three years ending in 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated. The earlier years were mostly a time of recession and sluggish economic growth, they thought.
"Basically we are living in a situation in which public mood is that jobs are at risk," said Henry Farber, a Princeton University labor economist.
The labor department data released Thursday revealed that from the time Clinton took office in 1993 through 1995 the jobs of about 7.2 percent of the work force were eliminated.
The New York Times, in a series of articles on downsizing in March, combined the government's job displacement data into a single set of figures that reconciled overlapping numbers from different surveys. Using this data, The Times estimated that a total of 43.5 million job losses occurred from 1979 through 1995.
That series included projections for the years 1994 and 1995 that showed a modest decline in the number of jobs lost. Substituting the actual data for the projections produced a total of 43.3 million jobs lost for the 17-year period.
An article in The New Yorker quoted the White House's chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, as saying that The Times' projections for 1994 and 1995 should be taken "with a grain of salt."
A major point of The Times series was that the level of job loss had remained higher than in past economic recoveries.
White-collar workers represented 52 percent of those who lost jobs and blue-collar workers 35 percent, much different from the early 1980s, when layoffs were largely a blue-collar phenomenon. Men still edged-out women, 56 percent to 44 percent, but women were up two percentage points from the early 1990s, while men slipped by the same amount.
People in their prime working years, 25 to 54, still represented the overwhelming majority of those laid-off: 78 percent, up a tiny percentage point from the early 1990s.
The survey, covering 50,000 representative households, found hat 73 percent of those who lost their jobs from 1993 through 1995 ere employed again when the survey was done last February, compared with 68 percent in the early 1990s. Only 9.8 percent consider themselves as job-hunting and unemployed, down from 13.1 per cent in the earlier period.
Of the 3.9 million people who lost full-time jobs under the Clinton administration's economic policies in the 1993-1994 period, 33 percent had landed new full-time jobs by last February that paid as much as or more than the ones they had lost, the report found. That was up slightly from 31 percent in the early 1990s.
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