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6/13/04
SURVEY What do working women want? A good job with benefits, according to a telephone survey of 1,450 US women. The survey was commissioned by the AFL-CIO, the national labor federation. It reveals that 48 percent of the women polled were unemployed over the past year or had relatives or friends who were unemployed. Twenty-five percent of the respondents were employed but did not have medical insurance, prescription drug coverage, sick pay, or retirement benefits. ''The survey dramatically demonstrates that the jobs crisis deeply affects America's working families,'' said Linda Chavez-Thompson, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO. ''The new jobs being created offer 20 percent lower wages, on average, than those that have been lost and many don't offer basic benefits.'' The US Labor Department said last week that the nation added close to 250,000 new jobs in May. Since March, the government said, a total of 1 million jobs have been added to the economy. 
Jack Triplett, a visiting fellow in economics at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C., said the job picture has brightened considerably but ''press reports on the job situation have missed the big picture,'' fueling the public's job worries.''What we have had is a rapid rate of productivity, the highest we have had in years,'' he said. ''Now, we are getting job pickup.'' The AFL-CIO noted that women may be more concerned about job creation and job security these days because they contribute significantly more to their families' total earnings than they have in the past. In 1999, for example, economists at Northeastern University's Center for Labor Market Studies reported that gains made by working women fueled a dramatic growth in family income in New England. The study showed that from 1983 to 1997, the real earnings of married couples with college degrees went up 45 percent, from $70,079 to $101,780 and most of that gain stemmed from women's wages. One reason women contribute more to family wages is that they are working longer hours these days. Northeastern's research found most women in New England were working, on average, 50 to 60 hours per week. ''Four in 10 work evenings, nights or weekends on a regular basis and one-third work shifts different from their spouses or partners,'' the union survey said. Additionally, 30 percent of the women polled make all or almost all of their families' annual earnings. Three in five earn 50 percent of their families' yearly wages, the report said. The AFL-CIO said it delivered some of the results from a separate online survey of 10,000 working women to President George Bush and US Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, because it would like the incumbent president and his primary challenger to focus on the women's concerns. The second survey revealed that 81 percent support laws to make healthcare more affordable, up from 60 percent in 2002 and 57 percent in 2000. The 2004 telephone survey, ''Ask A Working Woman,'' was conducted by Lake Snell Perry & Associates, a national opinion research firm in Washington, D.C. The respondents were adult women 18 and older. The survey's margin of error was plus or minus 3.5 percent. --DIANE E. LEWIS
STAFFING FIRMS Here's some good news for the nation's temporary and contract workers. The American Staffing Association reports the country's staffing firms employed 9.1 percent more people in the first quarter of this year than they did during the same period last year. The increase lifted the US staffing industry's revenues to $14.1 billion in the first quarter, up 7.8 percent over the year-earlier quarter. The trade group said the nation's staffing companies employed an average of 2.3 million temporary and contract workers daily from January-March 2004, about 200,000 more than they employed during the period last year. Richard Wahlquist, chief executive officer of ASA, attributed the change to strong employment growth in the last several quarters, a sign that the economy is picking up, he said. ''The continued increase in staffing industry employment in the first quarter confirms that the jobs piece of this recovery had finally fallen into place,'' Wahlquist said. ''With growth strongest in the industrial and professional-technical sectors, we are seeing companies using temporary and contract employment to expand their operations as demand for their products and services increase.'' --DIANE E. LEWIS
INVESTIGATIONS UMass Memorial Medical Center paid over $614,000 in back wages to hundreds of nurses following an investigation by the US Department of Labor, the department said last week. Investigators found the 367 registered nurses at the hospital's University Campus in Worcester did not regularly take their 30-minute meal breaks, but the medical center automatically deducted the time from their pay. Since the nurses were paid hourly, they were entitled to time-and-a-half overtime pay, according to the Fair Labor Standards Act. The probe by the department's Wage and Hour Division covered a two-year period from July 2000 to July 2002. The medical center paid $614,449 to the nurses for their uncompensated overtime work. ''This was not an issue of nurses not being paid their rightful wages at all,'' hospital spokesman Mark Shelton said. ''This is a document issue that we addressed with the Department of Labor back in 2002.'' --ASSOCIATED PRESS
E-MAIL BALTIMORE -- Trying to get out from under an avalanche of millions of e-mail messages, Baltimore will start automatically deleting any messages older than 90 days within the next month -- a move that critics say could threaten future searches for public records. City workers must sort through messages now slowing municipal computers to a crawl to find any e-mails on official agency business, then save them on their hard drives or on paper. Some see a potential loss for historians, reporters, and others who have an interest in perusing public records. ''Who's going to go through their e-mail and do that?'' asked Lee Strickland, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Information Policy. ''You're going to have reams of material disappear.'' --ASSOCIATED PRESS
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