L.A. Sues Labor Dept. Over Counting Jobless

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and other city officials filed suit Friday, accusing U.S. Labor Secretary Ann McLaughlin of lowering the unemployment count in what the mayor said was an election year ploy to make the Reagain Administration look good. He said Los Angeles would be a loser financially, too.

Asked at a press conference if he thought the change in statistics gathering was prompted by 1988 politics, Bradley said that “is as sound a speculation as I have heard from anyone.”

The dispute between the Democratic city government and the Republican Reagan Administration centers on a survey that the U.S. Labor Department takes each month to determine the unemployment rate.

The information is used for a variety of purposes, but one in particular attracted mayoral notice. Funds for job training, which go from Washington to Sacramento to City Hall and finally to private and community-based programs for the unemployed, are determined by the unemployment count.

Until April 1, the Labor Department conducted special surveys in Los Angeles and New York. In Los Angeles, it consisted of a poll of 2,100 households. That provided more information about Los Angeles, biggest city in the state, than other areas of California. Unemployment information from other areas came from a more limited survey, based largely on the number of people applying for assistance at state unemployment offices.

Beginning this month, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics stopped taking the special surveys for New York and Los Angeles. By dropping the 2,100 households in Los Angeles, a Labor Department official in Washington said, it made for a less precise survey, generally resulting in a lower jobless count statewide.

The official, Tom Plewes, the bureau’s assistant commissioner for employment and unemployment statistics, said the method was changed because “we got an across-the-board (budget) cut and the only way to cut dollars (on the survey) was to cut the sample.”

“There was nothing political,” he said. “This was done by a group of people who had to cut the budget.”

But the lawsuit charges that the revised method of counting the unemployed “has been shown to be unreliable in that it under-reports actual unemployment. . . .”

At the press conference, Bradley said this will result in a lowering of the statistical unemployment figure in Los Angeles from 5.9% to 5.1%.

“We find it absolutely unacceptable,” Bradley said. He called the decision “an arbitrary and unilateral action which is certainly not in the interests of the city of Los Angeles.”

City Councilman Robert Farrell, who joined Bradley and City Atty. James K. Hahn at the press conference, said the reduced count of unemployed will cut the amount of federal dollars available to the city for job training programs.

And, Farrell said, a reduction in the quality of information about the jobless will make it difficult to target aid toward those who urgently need help.

The suit says the new data collecting method will reduce job training funds to Los Angeles County by about $7 million a year, with the city losing about $3.5 million of that.