October 18, 1993

The average length of unemployment claims is at an all-time high in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut in what state labor department officials say provides one of the most graphic indications of a job market that continues to shrink. The average length of claims gives a picture of the job prospects of the recently unemployed but does not account for those entering the job market or the long-term unemployed. While unemployment rates have fallen, after soaring to their highest levels in a decade last year, employment remains flat in the region largely because jobs are not being created. New York's Labor Department currently estimates the average worker who loses their job will be out of work for more than a year.

A BARRIER TO HEALTH-CARE PLANS Two weeks ago, Earn J. Lloyd of Morris Heights, the Bronx, staggered into the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center nearly comatose, nearly blind and barely able to walk. Doctors discovered he had severe diabetes, which kept him in the hospital for 10 days. But Mr. Lloyd's more serious medical problem was the lack of a decent general doctor, which for him and hundreds of thousands of others in New York's poorer neighborhoods turns treatable outpatient diseases into life-threatening conditions. This severe deficit of doctors in poor urban neighborhoods will make President Clinton's health-care plan, or any alternative, difficult to carry out in the areas that most need the help. A1. NEW YORK CITY DIFFERING SHARPLY ON THE ECONOMY As New York City struggles to shake itself out of its worst recession in half a century, the mayoral candidates are offering sharply different prescriptions on how to revive the local economy -- a split that mirrors a national debate over economic policy. The Republican-Liberal challenger, Rudolph W. Giuliani, contends that fiscal conservatism -- keeping a balanced budget, streamlining city agencies and keeping them off the backs of business -- provides the best hope for the economy. But Mayor Dinkins has unveiled proposals that many see as a sort of industrial policy, with the city marshaling resources to aid 12 industries in the hope that they will become centers of economic growth. A1.

The Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, said today that he would introduce legislation to restrict President Clinton from committing forces for use in Haiti, except for reasons of national security. Mr. Dole said that restoring President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power was not worth a single American life and that the American people wanted more restraint on the use of troops abroad. Administration officials responded that they would fight Mr. Dole's proposal on both legal and foreign policy grounds. Legally, they said, such legislation would constitute an infringement on the right of the President to make foreign policy. Substantively, they said, the proposal would feed isolationist trends mounting around the country.

It is nearly 10 P.M. and the toll taker at the Triborough Bridge's Manhattan Plaza is near the end of her shift. Her routine is methodical, icily efficient. She glances out the window to see the kind and size of vehicle approaching. She then pushes a button to electronically post the fare on a display screen. In a practiced movement, she reaches out for money. She hands back a token or change. She does this 300 times an hour, three seconds a car, an endless stream of stop-and-go. Such are the labors of one of life's invisible people, a toll taker for the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which last year collected $653.6 million from 277 million vehicles. This particular transaction is recorded in grainy black-and-white images on a jerky surveillance video tape. The woman, who officials would not name, is about to become a statistic, one of 26 Bridge and Tunnel officers to be robbed at gunpoint this year, already three times the number in all 1992.

Charles Paris is contemplating laying off supervisors next year from his building maintenance company in Manhattan. Lawrence G. English is looking to open a new plant out of state rather than moving the entire workforce of his casket company into its new building in Syracuse. Shawn P. Wood already has relocated out of state, closing his small electronics repair shop in Binghamton and moving it seven miles into Pennsylvania. The common thread in these tales of financial woe is not foreign competition or constricting markets. Rather, it is New York State's stunning succession of double-digit increases in the cost of workers' compensation insurance over the last six years. Since 1988, the State Insurance Department has allowed average workers' compensation rates to rise by 153.2 percent on a compounded basis.