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washingtonpost.com
134,000 Lost Jobs in August 'Mass Layoffs'

By Kirstin Downey
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 26, 2003; Page E01

More U.S. workers lost their jobs in large layoffs in August, the
Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday, another sign that
employers are continuing to trim payrolls even as the economy
strengthens.

The BLS tracks what it calls "mass layoffs," or firings of more than
50 workers in a single month by a single employer, by compiling
reports on initial claims for unemployment benefits filed with state
agencies. The numbers include temporary and permanent firings.

About 134,000 workers lost their jobs in 1,258 mass layoffs nationwide
last month, up from the 128,103 employees who were fired in 1,248 such
actions in August 2002, the bureau said.

The mass-layoff report is a snapshot of monthly employment changes
across the country. Manufacturing took the hardest hit of any sector
in August, accounting for nearly a third of all mass layoffs and more
than a third of the number of workers who lost jobs, the report said.
Job losses were also reported in transportation equipment, textile
mills, machinery and food manufacturing.

California, New York, Illinois, North Carolina and Texas had the most
mass layoffs, the report said.

The numbers of people losing jobs in mass layoffs increased most in
textile mills and in the motion picture and sound recording
industries.

Lewis Siegal, a BLS senior economist, said the overall numbers are not
as bleak as they appear, because in many cases they do not represent
"long-term layoffs." He said that 7 percent of the claims, for
example, occurred in temporary-help services, and those jobs are, by
definition, short-lived. And employment in some industries, such as
movies and recording, fluctuates according to production schedules.

But some economists say many manufacturing jobs, such as those
formerly held by textile-mill workers in North Carolina, are probably
gone for good.

"We've got a sort of despair," said Harry E. Payne Jr., chairman of
the North Carolina Employment Security Commission. "Whatever resources
the state has in terms of being able to help people are being greatly
taxed."

In Southern California, motion-picture industry employment is steadily
eroding, said Bradley Kemp, a state labor analyst. Since May 1999,
employment in that sector has fallen from 155,000 jobs in that region
to about 114,200. Many jobs were moved to Canada and elsewhere as
movie-production companies seek to work in areas with lower prevailing
wages.

Illinois had 50 mass layoffs in August, according to the BLS. Brenda
A. Russell, director of the Illinois Department of Employment
Security, said the state has lost manufacturing and wholesaling jobs,
and is developing an economic development network statewide that it
hopes will create a system to alert officials of impending plant
cutbacks and closings.

One of the mass layoffs in Illinois involved Tellabs, a
Naperville-based telecommunications equipment company that announced
in August that it was laying off 325 workers at its only U.S.
manufacturing plant. Tellabs is outsourcing the work to another
company, which will move almost all the jobs to Guadalajara, Mexico.
Tellabs cut its workforce from 8,900 in April 2001 to 3,825.

"This reduction is to help keep our expenses in line with the fall of
sales," said George Stenitzer, a company spokesman. He said the
company had managed to maintain a U.S. manufacturing workforce longer
than its competitors, including Lucent Technologies, Cisco and Nortel,
which he said began outsourcing their labor to other countries years
ago.