THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 19, 1996 TAG: 9605170642
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 128 lines
So last month I'm heading West on Interstate 64 outside of Charlottesville, and two Ford pickups go zinging past.
One's the old kind, probably a '78 or '79. It's in great shape, red with white trim, a true American classic. The other one's a 1997 model. Big, blue, sleek, probably made in Norfolk.
Norfolk had better be darned thankful for those pickups, I'm thinking. These days a city doesn't just go out and recruit a company that pays 2,000 people about 18 bucks an hour like they do at the South Norfolk F-150 plant.
The economy was on my mind. I was headed to a weekend conference on ``Economics and the '96 Elections.'' That doesn't sound like a very stimulating weekend, but the conference was at The Greenbrier, a couple of editors had suggested I go, and it's usually a good idea to keep the bosses happy.
I thought The Greenbrier was a funny place for a conference on economics. Most journalists I know, most people I know, and most Americans wouldn't care to shell out the $345 per night it costs to stay there. That's a week's take-home pay to a lot of people.
Pocketbook issues have held sway in presidential elections for a long time, but 1996 seems different. The economy is doing well by nearly every measure. Yet Americans are more worried about job security and finances. The reporters at the conference would come to call these people, you people, ``The Anxious Class.''
Of course, voters aren't worried about paying for a night at the Greenbrier. They're worried about losing their jobs, paying $20,000-a-year college tuitions, buying one of those new Ford pickups costing $24,000. They're worried about whether they'll ever get any of that money back that they've been paying into Social Security.
The 35 journalists at the conference thought the biggest story of this election year is the Anxious Class.
The Anxious Class is not a tough story for a journalist to report. A company makes an announcement like this (taken from the statement of a Norfolk company's voluntary early retirement offer): We are restructuring to ``enhance our efforts at better asset utilization, strengthen our business initiatives and intensify our customer focus.''
The reporter heads out to the business as the workday ends, interviews the newly unemployed through their car windows and quotes them in the paper or puts them on TV.
Newspaper readers think, ``Gosh, I know that woman. How sad. That could have been me.''
What reporters don't do - and perhaps cannot do - is report the effect of these layoff announcements on people not directly involved. Friends, neighbors, relatives of the victims of downsizings. That's the Anxious Class.
That's how the national psyche has been battered for several years. In 1993, when IBM laid off (fired) 63,000. In 1994, when GTE dismissed 17,000, Digital Equipment Corp. canned 20,000 and Nynex fired 16,800.
The country's state of mind took a blow early this year when AT&T kicked things off in January by shedding another 40,000 workers.
All those stories are headline makers. Front page stuff.
There's even an outplacement firm in Chicago - Challenger, Gray & Christmas - that has become a household name among journalists because it counts the bodies. Challenger, Gray issues monthly statistics on layoff announcements.
No surprise then that 51 percent of registered voters told Peter Hart Research Associates that jobs and the economy will be one of the top two considerations when they pick the next president.
But hang on there, the economics experts told the reporters. Things are humming along pretty darned well. Inflation is at a manageable - some say ideal - 3 percent. More than 8 million jobs have been added to the economy since President Clinton took office. Unemployment is low. It just dipped under 4 percent in Virginia for the first time in six years.
A story about inflation remaining low is not a headline maker. It's not a ``sexy story.'' With the plant closings and the downsizings, you've got the faces of laid off friends and neighbors to help tell the story. Try putting a face on a story about low inflation.
That may account for an impression that things are worse off than they are, pollster Fred Hartwig of Hart Research told the reporters.
``What you've been telling people is that the economy's in the toilet,'' Hartwig said. ``And people in some vague way take that and say, `Well, I'm pretty well off, but I'm not sure the country is.' ''
Frank Wykoff, an economist for the Foundation, went so far as to say that historically ``this century will be viewed as the greatest period of economic growth.''
At this point, I'm thinking that these economists are a pretty cold bunch. I'd like to introduce them to a ``laid off'' shipyard worker or a ``downsized'' Virginia Power employee or maybe somebody who needs two jobs to pay rent.
And I'm wondering who's right. People who fear losing their jobs, or economists who applaud new job opportunities?
I guess both views could be accurate. Scads of economic data is collected these days: consumer price index, unemployment, job creation, job loss. People who are unemployed for extended periods of time fall off the books and are no longer counted as ``unemployed'' even though they can't find a job.
``There's a lot of noise in this data,'' Wykoff says. ``It's like listening to a radio with a lot of static; you can't really tell what's going on.''
In other words, economic data is hard to interpret. Ten people can look at the latest economic reports and each can see a different situation.
The thing is, the economy is creating plenty of jobs. And plenty of people are losing their jobs. The economists call this ``structural'' unemployment. That means that new technologies make some workers unnecessary.
An obvious example of structural unemployment would be: Someone gets laid off from a textile mill. There are plenty of jobs being created in her community in the computer manufacturing business, but she doesn't have the skills to do one of those jobs.
``To say that somebody loses their job is not to say there aren't enough jobs,'' Wykoff said. ``There are different jobs.''
All this stuff is pretty confusing. It seems the more your hear about the economy, the more you worry about the economy and the more anxious you become.
That's an intangible Clinton probably didn't expect to face in this election year. Any other time, an inflation rate under 3 percent, a soaring stock market and 8 million new jobs would amount to the voters rubber stamping the president for a second term.
As for me, I end up still thinking about those Ford pickups and the workers who make them. I think this is the crux of it: What if people stop buying Ford pickups or if the 200 or so robots at the plant work out and pretty soon Ford uses robots rather than Norfolk workers to build its trucks?
What would happen to those workers if they had to swap their $37,000 a year jobs for $18,000-a-year telemarketing jobs?
The economists would say they had found new jobs. They'd call it structural unemployment.
The workers would say they'd taken a 50 percent pay cut. They'd call it brutal. by CNB