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Do we even trust our leaders to help?
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FBI asked to investigate attack on white family near Firestone Park
Woman, 75, charged with beating fawn to death
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Stallworth test showed marijuana
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Men's Basketball Scheduling update
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As California Goes?
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Why do public officials violate Ohio Ethics Laws?
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Report: Ontko selects Wisconsin
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Oh Baby!
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Where do We Go from Here?
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Closings….Not the Good Kind!
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Margy inquires-when is a Taste of Hudson?
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DDI One of Best Places to Work
Akron Gamer:
Video game sales drop in May
Published on Sunday, May 25, 2008
News stories about the loss of middle-management jobs are common, but numbers to document the trend are harder to find.
That's largely because of the way the government keeps count of workers.
Job numbers most often cited by public officials, economists and business people come from a monthly report, Current Employment Statistics, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from a survey of more than 150,000 businesses and government agencies.
A second source, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, provides more accurate but less timely data.
As its name implies, the census is an exact count of workers and their pay, based on reports businesses must file with states for all those covered by unemployment insurance.
The problem is that both the survey and census classify employees according to where they work — not by what they do. As a result, management workers aren't counted as a group; they're spread out among the myriad of industry sectors.
For example, a personnel director for an auto-parts maker is counted among manufacturing employees, while a hospital personnel director is classified in the health-care sector.
The government does have a survey, Occupational Employment Statistics, that groups people by the work they do. But that survey has existed in its current form for less than a decade. More important, it's updated only once a year and isn't designed to allow easy comparisons to earlier years.
''Our focus is on producing wages and employment for one given point in time,'' said George Stamas, chief of the Occupational Employment Statistics program.
It was the occupational employment data that the Beacon Journal analyzed for this report.
—David Knox
News stories about the loss of middle-management jobs are common, but numbers to document the trend are harder to find.
That's largely because of the way the government keeps count of workers.
Job numbers most often cited by public officials, economists and business people come from a monthly report, Current Employment Statistics, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics from a survey of more than 150,000 businesses and government agencies.
A second source, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, provides more accurate but less timely data.
As its name implies, the census is an exact count of workers and their pay, based on reports businesses must file with states for all those covered by unemployment insurance.
The problem is that both the survey and census classify employees according to where they work — not by what they do. As a result, management workers aren't counted as a group; they're spread out among the myriad of industry sectors.
For example, a personnel director for an auto-parts maker is counted among manufacturing employees, while a hospital personnel director is classified in the health-care sector.
The government does have a survey, Occupational Employment Statistics, that groups people by the work they do. But that survey has existed in its current form for less than a decade. More important, it's updated only once a year and isn't designed to allow easy comparisons to earlier years.
''Our focus is on producing wages and employment for one given point in time,'' said George Stamas, chief of the Occupational Employment Statistics program.
It was the occupational employment data that the Beacon Journal analyzed for this report.
—David Knox
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