JOB MARKET LOOKING UP : REPORT CITES ABOVE-AVERAGE PAY OF NEW POSITIONS, SHORTER UNEMPLOYMENT.

Byline: David E. Sanger The New York Times

The Council of Economic Advisers will report today that more than two-thirds of the new jobs created in the United States in 1994 and 1995 paid better than the average job, administration officials said Monday.

They also said that despite waves of corporate layoffs, the length of time most workers spent unemployed in recent years has actually declined.

Nonetheless, the report, written by Joseph Stiglitz, the head of the council, found some evidence that the rate at which jobs have been eliminated has risen slightly, despite strong economic growth.

Though the evidence is murky - and subject to differing interpretations within the administration - the statistics suggest that managers and other relatively high-paid white-collar workers who have been the focus of the most publicized rounds of layoffs are staying unemployed longer.

Stiglitz's report, which the White House plans to issue today, tries to answer one of the most politically charged questions of this election year: Is there statistical justification for the high anxiety felt in the American workplace today?

Stiglitz has argued that many of the recent reports about declining wages and corporate downsizing, including a seven-part series in The New York Times called ``The Downsizing of America,'' have exaggerated the severity of the turmoil in the American workplace.

``This puts us on a track to say that we've gone through tremendous dislocations, the kind of dislocations that come out of an economy with more job-creating energy than anywhere in the industrial world,'' a top Clinton adviser said Monday. ``But it's tricky business, because you are walking the fine line of telling people things are pretty good while acknowledging that they are feeling pretty bad.''

In fact, as the politically sensitive report has been worked into final form in recent days, some officials of the Labor Department, which also contributed to the study, have complained that Stiglitz was too intent on emphasizing the pace of job creation, at the expense of what a senior Clinton administration official called ``the clear anxiety you feel whenever you step into a factory.''

But Labor officials say they have no argument with one of the most encouraging signs in the report: evidence that the stagnation of real wages has hit bottom, and that in the past year they have begun to inch back up. Real wages have been frozen for many years, but the issue has gained much attention in the past year or two as the economy has grown rapidly.

The change may be barely noticeable to most workers, however. The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, for the first quarter of this year, showed median wages are now $25,428, slightly less than the first quarter of last year.

But that decline was chiefly a reflection of the continued rise in the number of women in the work force, commanding lower wages, on average, than men. The statistics showed that male workers have seen their wages increase 1.3 percent.

Administration officials were quick to caution Monday that the study was fairly narrowly focused on a small part of the work force - the 8.4 million new jobs created in the last four years in an economy of nearly 120 million jobs - and that much of the data about the changing nature of layoffs in the past two years remained fragmentary.

Nonetheless, Clinton's aides say that the study builds a foundation for the central theme of the president's re-election campaign, that Clinton has presided over an economy that is based more and more on ``high wage, high skill'' jobs, reversing a long trend of job growth in lower-paying jobs in service industries.