Manufacturing jobs, however, have been resolutely down for two months. You would have been down more, but you had twenty-eight thousand people who were off because of strikes and related shutdowns who came back this month, and you saw a lot of small declines in industries, industries like textile and apparel which have been going down for a very long period of time. Some industries like furniture and fixtures, which turned down last year some time, continued to go down and one industry, electronic components manufacturing, which was one of the few manufacturing industries that had continued to grow steadily, has now been down two months in a row. How the market saw this with Texas broker David Johnson in a few minutes. Just how voters see the unemployment picture is a key question in the Clinton and Dole camps, as Marketplace's Washington editor John Dimsdale reports.
Unemployment there is very low, especially in Michigan where it's only four and a half percent.
Job-wise, voters in those states should feel better now than they did four years ago. But in the big enchilada of electoral votes, California, unemployment is still a problem. For example, there's concern over crime, violence in the media, and threats to Social Security and Medicare. I'm John Dimsdale in Washington. The Labor Department had words of praise for itself today.