Posts Tagged: labor statistics

PSA: Carl Fillichio on “The Best Gig You Can Have”

By Norman Kelley | Nov 10 2009 at 08:51 | Your take (3)

Part of Understanding Government’s new Public Service Announcement series featuring federal employees and profiles of what they do

By Norman Kelley

You would expect a certain amount of spin from an interview with a Labor Department public affairs official about his work. However, Carl Fillichio truly likes what he does, so his aim is true.

Preferring to call his recent installment at the U. S. Dept. of Labor a “second go at the rodeo,” Carl Fillichio, Senior Adviser to the Secretary of Labor for Public Affairs and Communications, is ebullient about his work and the mission of getting the department’s message out.

“The way I look at communications, it’s not just issuing press releases, or doing press conferences or doing a newsletter, it is events and speaking engagements, and all sorts of opportunities to get our message out. I have my finger in all that type of stuff.”

Previously a Clinton appointee who served under Labor secretaries Robert Reich and Alexis Hermann, Fillichio engages in the full panoply of media for the department. “It’s the best gig you can have, public service.” (more…)

Topics: Dept. of Labor, Free Agency, Public Service Profiles
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Toward A More Effective Way to Measure Misery

By Matthew Blake | Oct 14 2009 at 10:06 | Your take

The New York Times‘ Louis Uchitelle reports on the growing prevalence of wage cuts:

State workers in Georgia are taking home smaller paychecks. So are the tens of thousands of employees in California’s public university system. The steel company Nucor and the technology giant Hewlett-Packard have embraced the practice. So have several airlines and many small businesses.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track pay cuts, but it suggests they are reflected in the steep decline of another statistic: total weekly pay for production workers, pilots among them, representing 80 percent of the work force. That index has fallen for nine consecutive months, an unprecedented string over the 44 years the bureau has calculated weekly pay, capturing the large number of people out of work, those working fewer hours and those whose wages have been cut. The old record was a two-month decline, during the 1981-1982 recession.

This trend is further evidence of how problematic the unemployment rate is. The rate doesn’t reflect reduced wages and hours or people who have stopped looking for a job. Yet it’s the near-universal shorthand for explaining how the recession impacts the labor force. Saying there’s 9.8 percent jobless rate does sound bad. But it’s pretty anti-septic compared with the range of obstacles workers actually face.

Topics: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Beltway Outsider, Dept. of Labor
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