U.S. to Change Focus on Number-Crunching : Effort to Collect Trade Figures Will Mean Cuts in Breakdowns by Community

Residents of mid-sized cities in the West will no longer get detailed figures from the government on monthly price changes in their communities.

In New York and Los Angeles, monthly household surveys of employment and unemployment are being cut back sharply. Tracking of trends among blacks, Hispanics, teen-agers and women in the two cities will be less current.

The government is changing the numbers it collects and crunches to measure whether times are good or bad.

As a result, a congressional mandate to find out what happens to laid-off workers in all 50 states when their local factories close is being scaled back to cover just 32 states.

Wage surveys in some of the fastest growing occupations--architects, engineers and health technicians--have been abandoned. Postponed indefinitely are efforts to learn more about the growing numbers of people who hold down two or more jobs.

In their place, the government is going to provide more and better trade figures--beginning with monthly rather than quarterly changes in the prices of imported and exported goods.

The changes are being made by the Labor and Commerce departments partly in response to the globalization of the economy and changing perceptions of what is important.

With unemployment at a decade-low 5.7% and inflation running below 4.5%, the monthly jobless and consumer price figures command less attention than when either or both were in double digits.

Survey Size Cut

Just as big a factor--if not bigger--is the deficit-reducing budget cuts negotiated by Congress and President Reagan last year. Statistics gatherers were ordered to take the same across-the-board spending cuts as the Pentagon.

March and April will be the last months the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys consumer price changes in Salt Lake City; Sacramento; Phoenix; Columbus, Ohio; Raeford, N.C., and five primarily rural counties in central Kentucky.

Beginning next month, the bureau will reduce the size of its monthly employment surveys from 2,200 to 1,300 households in New York City and from 2,100 to 825 households in Los Angeles for an annual savings of $750,000.

Detailed reports on changes among racial and other demographic subgroups in the two cities will be issued every six months instead of every three months.

Another $427,000 in about $9.7 million that Congress cut from the bureau’s budget will be saved by delaying a special report on dual job holders--a growing phenomenon that could help explain how Americans maintain their living standards despite hourly wage increases that don’t keep pace with inflation.

Spared in the cuts are data collection and analyses that would diminish the accuracy of the bureau’s most widely used reports: the monthly nationwide surveys of employment and unemployment and consumer and wholesale prices.

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t produce any useless products, but we have to prioritize them,” says its deputy commissioner, William J. Barron. “Our budget was cut 4.6% across the board and, to preserve the integrity of the national figures, some of the regional, local and special programs became vulnerable. We did the best we could.”

Not everyone agrees.

Complaints Called Inevitable

New York Mayor Edward I. Koch, foreseeing a rise in unemployment, complained in a letter to Labor Secretary Ann McLaughlin that collecting less data for his city amounts to “turning off the lights in the operating room when the operation is still in progress.”

Undersecretary of Commerce Robert Ortner--who oversees the government’s data on retail sales, trade, economic growth and housing--said complaints are inevitable whenever any data is reduced or eliminated.

“New York City complains it’s no longer getting special treatment, but that’s the nature of New York,” Ortner said. “They think they are entitled to special treatment.”

Also falling victim to the budget ax are Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys in six cities on wages in auto repair shops, hotels and motels. Future reductions are planned in surveys of wages in hospitals, nursing homes, banking and computer services.

“All of these things are important,” said the bureau’s Barron. “But the overall issue facing everybody is the budget deficit. We’re just adhering to what Congress ordered.”