Job Loss

Montgomery leads in recent job growthIn the recent article "Baltimore County leads a boom" (Feb. 18), The Sun states, "Today, the county leads the state in net job gain . . ." Strictly, speaking, that statement is not accurate.Baltimore County led the state in job growth earlier in the decade but the most recent figures show Montgomery County in first place by a comfortable margin. Between the second quarters of 1996 and 1997, Montgomery County added 10,575 new jobs, compared with Baltimore County's 6,848 new jobs.

Held back by Baltimore City's sluggish economy, the metropolitan area added 7,000 jobs in 1996, growing at less than half the rate attained by Maryland and failing once again to reach its employment peak of seven years ago, according to a new government report.Baltimore and its five surrounding counties were home to 1.136 million jobs last year, based on an average of monthly employment measurements by the U.S. Labor Department. That's about half of all the work in Maryland.The region had 0.6 percent more jobs last year than in 1995, compared with statewide employment growth of 1.4 percent and national employment growth of 2.2 percent.

IT WAS A STUNNING BLOW to folks in Garrett County, Maryland's western-most subdivision. Bausch & Lomb, the area's largest employer, announced it was shutting its 25-year-old plant in Oakland by the end of the year. That means a loss of 600 good-paying jobs in a town of only 1,700 residents. The company's contribution to the local economy nearly equals the entire county budget.Oakland's mayor said he was in "disbelief." There was no advance warning, no time for a counter-offer. Bausch and Lomb is struggling.

Maryland's economy will shuffle along in 1996, adding few jobs but summoning enough strength to avoid recession, despite continuing corporate layoffs and prospects of a shrinking federal government, interviews with economists and businessmen and businesswomen indicate.The state's feeble expansion is three years old. Maryland employers have added 88,000 jobs since September of 1992, the bottom of the last recession. But Maryland's 2.164 million jobs are still 21,000 jobs short of the pre-recession high reached in June of 1990.

Maryland was one of only six states that suffered a net job loss last year, according to a new Labor Department report, but strong employment growth in the last half of the year pointed to a much stronger 1994.While job creation picked up in much of the nation last year, Maryland companies cut their payrolls by about 1,000 jobs, or 0.05 percent, according to data released by the U.S. Labor Department. Hardest-hit were the construction and manufacturing industries.But economists said the small statewide job loss belied a clear trend of job gains toward the end of the year.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton's political stock is so low right now that it's inevitable that when defeated Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York speaks at the National Press Club here on Friday, he'll be asked whether he's going to run for president in 1996.Although Cuomo's own stock has also gone south after his loss to Republican George Pataki in his try for a fourth term, he remains one of the most articulate and thoughtful Democratic leaders -- a fact that survives his unvarnished identification as a liberal in these days when "liberal" seems to be such a dirty word.

Having declared last June that the recent recession had eliminated many more jobs than anyone had realized, the Labor Department is now canceling that view.The department says it overstated by 540,000 the number of jobs that were created in the late 1980s. And then it overstated how many jobs had disappeared in the recession.Not until early this year did the Labor Department realize that any of these figures were incorrect, and that data processing companies that deliver payroll information to the government had miscounted.

I knew when I saw my uncles driving Nissans and Isuzus on their farms that the economy had changed. But the collapse of the American automobile industry is only one small part of what is becoming an enormous shift in our economy. We are fast becoming a country without jobs. Yet, somehow, we're still denying it.In the early 1980s, the first wave of plant closings hit blue-collar workers in the steel, auto and garment industries. Economists told us these workers would never get such well-paid jobs again.

The first time he was fired, Bill Gentz didn't have a clue about what was coming. He got the pink slip just a few hours after receiving a favorable performance review and a raise.Mr. Gentz, who had been planning how to tell his wife about his raise, suddenly found himself rehearsing how to tell her he'd lost his job."I was in a state of shock. It came out of the blue," Mr. Gentz says of the layoff in 1981. He still resents the way the Philadelphia chemical company let him go without warning after 10 years of service.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Six years ago, Richard T. Harris was a middle-aged Pennsylvania insurance executive and very comfortable with his life.Then his company was bought. He was fired."It was a total shock," Mr. Harris said.Although he probably had more reserves than many people after years as a well-paid executive, "I was scared to death I wouldn't be able to meet my obligations, especially my mortgage payment."His predicament led him to a new career: president of Morgard Inc., a Philadelphia company specializing in mortgage payment protection insurance.

Maryland employers added thousands of jobs last month, a sign that prospects could be improving for out-of-work residents, though unemployment continued to rise. The Labor Department estimated Friday that companies created 10,000 jobs between June and July, adjusted for seasonal variations. That's an unusually large number - the biggest increase in four years - but economists cautioned that the picture is probably skewed by the agency's attempt to account for normal hiring and layoff patterns in these abnormal economic times.

You pay thousands in deposits for a trip, then get laid off. Now what? If your travel insurer, cruise or airline company offers a "job-loss guarantee," you might get your money back. Or not, depending on the policy. Job-loss coverage is nothing new in travel, but more companies have jumped in the past two months. JetBlue Airways, Norwegian Cruise Line and at least two cruise sellers have announced layoff policies, and insurers are tweaking the rules. Typically, such policies return trip deposits if you get laid off. In March, Travelex Insurance Services of Omaha, Neb., a big industry player whose travel policies have covered job loss since 1996, decreased from three years to one year the length of time you must be with an employer to qualify for the benefit, said Vice President Sally Dunlap.

COSTA MESA, Calif. -At a town hall meeting yesterday during which people spoke of their lost jobs and their fears of economic problems to come, President Barack Obama painted his ambitious policy agenda as the antidote. Obama spoke to an audience of about 1,300 during his first stop on a two-day swing through California, aimed at mobilizing public support for his multitrillion-dollar budget. He wanted to visit a state coping with job losses and home foreclosures. And in a question-and-answer session, he quickly got a taste of how the sour economy has upended lives in Southern California.

TIP 41 Some layoff warning signs With unemployment climbing, more workers are concerned about whether they could be the next one out of a job. It's easy to see from the economy if your industry is suffering. And most workers can pick up enough signs on the job to know if their company is struggling. But sometimes, employees may be so focused on their job or doing their best to avoid the bad news that they could miss some signals. There's no sure way to know, but staffing firm Robert Half International has identified six red flags that you could be laid off in this recession.

First there was reality TV, a vast entertainment wasteland that demeaned all who participated and dulled the minds of millions of Americans and turned a grinning mannequin like Ryan Seacrest into an international celebrity. Then came reality videos on the Internet, and suddenly you could click on YouTube and MySpace and see everything from Girls Gone Wild on South Padre Island to Michael Richards doing his Klansman impersonation in a comedy club to a blotchy Saddam Hussein with a noose around his neck dropping through a gallows trap door.

There was a time when Conchy Bretos thought she would spend her entire career in government. Then Bretos lost a 1993 election for a seat on the Dade County Commission in Florida after a nasty campaign. And when she tried to return to her job as executive director of the county's Commission on the Status of Women, Bretos was fired. While her supporters complained bitterly that it was political retribution, she was not reinstated. She lost her political clout and many of her personal contacts, but Bretos was able to use one of her important contacts to become Florida's assistant secretary for aging and adult services.

NATIONAL DeLay indictments challenged The legal team of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay asked a court yesterday to throw out his indictment, arguing that a Texas district attorney attempted to browbeat and coerce grand jurors into filing criminal charges. pg 3a WORLD ElBaradei, agency win Nobel Mohamed ElBaradei and the organization he leads, the International Atomic Energy Agency, won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize yesterday for working to limit the spread of nuclear weapon technology.

IMAGINE WALKING into your office, as always, and discovering that your desk has been cleaned out; your department is shuttered and locked; or you have 30 minutes to collect your belongings and leave. Would you be able to cope with unemployment? Companies are hiring - unemployment stood at 5 percent in July, down from more than 6 percent two years ago - but the job market is less than robust. And there's always the risk that your employer will defy statistics: Technology giant Hewlett-Packard Co., for instance, announced last month that it would eliminate about 10 percent of its full-time work force.

Maryland lost 1,300 jobs in November, stretching out a bumpy patch that began when the local employment market screeched to a halt in August. But the unemployment rate remained steady at a low 3.9 percent, according to state numbers released yesterday. Economists said there's no reason to be worried yet because strong growth in earlier months means that nearly 50,000 jobs have been created since November of last year - a more reliable measure of employment health than the monthly numbers, which are adjusted for seasonal variations.

WHILE PRESIDENT BUSH crisscrosses the country touting our nation's strong economy, the data suggests that any economic strength is far overstated. After three months of robust employment growth, job growth stalled in June and July. Only 78,000 jobs were created in June, and a scant 32,000 jobs were generated in July. According to the President's Council of Economic Advisers, the tax-cut package that took effect in July 2003 was supposed to help create 306,000 jobs a month, for a total of 5.5 million jobs by the end of 2004.