Free Republic

As the New Year looms, many law graduates with heavy debt have yet to find work as attorneys — including the author of the self-deprecating new blog "Law Grad Working Retail." The blog's anonymous author graduated from a law school that was in the top 50 ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He was on law review and even got a summer position at a firm after his second year. He didn't get a job offer though. This grad still hasn't found legal work and took a job selling cologne just before the holidays to make ends meet. Now...

America’s economy may be picking up steam, but it remains a story of parts, with the various regions of the country performing in often radically divergent ways. To identify the regions with the most momentum coming out of the recession, we turned to Mark Schill, research director for the Praxis Strategy Group, who crunched a range of indicative data from 2007 to today for the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan statistical areas. To gauge economic vitality, we used four metrics: GDP growth, job growth, real median household income growth and current unemployment. To measure demographic strength we looked at population growth,...

Last Friday, President Obama met with mayors and mayors-elect from 16 of the country's major urban centers — including mayor-elect Bill Peduto from Pittsburgh — and endorsed a higher minimum wage as a policy that “could have a tremendous boost in a lot of cities.” Many of those attending were already convinced. The mayors-elect of Seattle and New York City, for instance, both endorsed dramatically higher minimum wages during their campaigns. But this moment of agreement on a feel-good policy that's supposed to help the poor couldn't be further detached from one hard empirical reality: Urban unemployment rates for young...

The world of technology has changed the way that we think about the work we do. Complete cities have been uprooted by technological changes that have force out entire industries. Detroit, once a huge center of industry, has taken a turn for the worse in recent years thanks to robotics. Where once it took a team of people to build a car, it now only takes a few individuals to regulate the automated builders. The automotive industry has been forever transformed. In the 1990s, there were many individuals who truly thought that the internet was a fad. It wasn’t long...

The employment rate among teenagers is incredibly dismal. I know this firsthand, since I have teens at home and teenage nieces and nephews who cannot find work. There’s an irritating theme that runs through family conversations about our unemployed teens, and the words I hear most often are “lazy” and “entitled.” “I had a paper route when I was their age,” one of the older members of the family will tell me every time we get together. “They need to get out and hustle. Walk the neighborhood, mow lawns, weed gardens. There’s lots of jobs out there for teens.” “They...

Here are some new charts from reader Tim Wallace on "Covered Employment" (working in a job eligible for unemployment benefits). First a few notes .... Typically, hours worked and wages paid to employees in covered employment are used as a basis in establishing unemployment benefits should an employee becomes unemployed by no fault of their own. Self-employed people are not covered by unemployment insurance but we still have to pay into the system. Covered employees are entitled to unemployment benefits if they earn enough wages and meet eligibility requirements of their state. For example, the State of Washington requires 680...

A Stockton, Calif. man believes his former status as an illegal immigrant, who operated under a fake Social Security number, should not have been held against him when he applied to become a correctional officer for the State of California. Monday, the Legal Aid Society – Employment Law Center (LAS-ELC) filed suit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Victor Guerrero, 34, against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) — which twice rejected Guerrero’s application to become a corrections officer due to his prior use of an invalid SSN — and the State Personnel Board...

<p>A national economic report lists Houston among the top 10 best performing cities in the U.S. as thousands move in to take jobs in the expanding energy sector.</p> <p>On the Milken Institute study, Houston comes in at No. 8 among the nation's 200 largest cities. That's down 4 spots from last year's rankings, but the report notes that employment and wage growth were still strong.</p>

Fully 20 percent of U.S. adults become rich for parts of their lives, wielding extensive influence over America's economy and politics, according to new survey data. These "new rich," made up largely of older professionals, working married couples and more educated singles, are becoming politically influential, and economists say their capacity to spend is key to the U.S. economic recovery. But their rise is also a sign of the nation's continuing economic polarization. They extend well beyond the wealthiest 1 percent, a traditional group of super-rich millionaires and billionaires with long-held family assets. The new rich have household income of...

After you heard President Obama’s call for a hike in the minimum wage, you probably wondered the same thing I did: Was Obama sent from the future by Skynet to prepare humanity for its ultimate dominion by robots? But just in case the question didn’t occur to you, let me explain. On Tuesday, the day before Obama called for an increase in the minimum wage, the restaurant chain Applebee’s announced that it will install iPad-like tablets at every table. Chili’s already made this move earlier this year. With these consoles customers will be able to order their meals and pay...

College graduates claimed the bulk of last month’s job gains, while high-school grads with no college lost jobs, highlighting a persistent divide in the recovery.

Remember the infamous business plan from the South Park episode?1.Collect Underpants 2.? 3.Profit Say hello to the president’s economic theory: Barack Obama ✔ @BarackObama Follow Here's how to improve our economy and create hundreds of thousands of jobs: #RaiseTheWage. http://OFA.BO/tXMYUq 2:48 PM - 4 Dec 2013 It would be an insult to readers to explain why this won’t work, but I will say that in my adult lifetime, every increase in the minimum wage has been followed within a year or two by a recession. Drew M. at AOSHQ endeavors to address the flaws in Obama’s idea, but it’s depressing...

The November jobs report is out from the Department of Labor and nonfarm payrolls rose more than expected. 203,000 jobs were added versus the expectation of 185,000. However, most jobs added were low paying jobs and holiday season related. The unemployment rate fell to 7.0% while the underemployment rate dropped to 13.2%. Labor force participation rate rose to 63.0% from 62.8%. WHERE were the jobs created? The biggest winners were low paying jobs related to the Holiday season for the most part: Food services and drinking places 17.9 General Merchandise Stores 13.8 Temporary Help Services 16.4 Home Health Care Services...

The lessons learned in youth jobs can pay off laterI vividly remember as a teenager obtaining my first job with a regular paycheck as a high school biology-laboratory assistant. It’s hard to describe how excited I was to be receiving a salary and contributing to the upkeep of my family’s household, but the biggest thrill was doing something important while at the same time acquiring many skills that would prove useful in the future. Through the kindness and interest of my high school science teachers, I gained great familiarity with many scientific techniques that enabled me to acquire a job...

The ADP employment report was released today and blew past expectations of 170,000 jobs added with a print of … 215,000 jobs added. Of course, we don’t know the composition of full-time versus part-time/temporary holiday employment, but at least employment increased. Change-in-Nonfarm-Private-Employment-November-2013 In fact, ADP job creation seems to be in a similar point to the previous decade in terms of level of ADP jobs added. Historical-Trend-Change-in-Total-Nonfarm-Private-Employment-November-2013 Here is the composition of jobs added. Notice that is mostly small firms. ADP Dec_0 Will The Fed begin tapering with this “good” news on employment? Well, interest rates are rising this morning...

Walmart, the United States' largest private employer with 1.3 million workers, is in major crisis mode. The brave Walmart workers, who've been putting their jobs on the line and getting arrested for over a year to demand an end to illegal retaliation for speaking out, full-time work for those who want it, and a living wage, are hoping to make history yet again on Black Friday - the busiest shopping day of the year in the US - by striking, protesting, and holding rallies at 1,500 stores across the country. In addition to major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami,...

Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, caused a flap where he pronounced that some people are too stupid to get ahead. But unless people are getting more stupid over time, it is likely bad government policies that are preventing people from getting ahead. Government policies including the Fed monetary expansion have seemingly made matters worse for the average American family. Particularly since 2007. The GINI coefficent is a measure of income distribution in country. And it has been skyrocketing since 2007 when Democrats took control of Congress and 2009 when they achieved a majority in both the House and Senate...

Government policies including the Fed monetary expansion have seemingly made matters worse for the average American family. Particularly since 2007. The GINI coefficent is a measure of income distribution in country. And it has been skyrocketing since 2007 when Democrats took control of Congress and 2009 when they achieved a majority in both the House and Senate AND the Presidency. But for all the talk of income redistribution and “leveling the playing field,” things have only gotten worse for the average American household. Here is the GINI coefficent for the USA since 2005. Note the decline from 2006 to 2007,...

Government policies including the Fed monetary expansion have seeming made matters worse for the average American family. Particularly since 2007. The GINI coefficent is a measure of income distribution in country. And it has been skyrocketing since 2007 when Democrats took control of Congress and 2009 when they achieved a majority in both the House and Senate AND the Presidency. But for all the talk of income redistribution and “leveling the playing field,” things have only gotten worse for the average American household. Here is the GINI coefficent for the USA since 2005. Note the decline from 2006 to 2007,...

Racial tensions are inflamed at the University of California at Los Angeles following several incidents — most notably, one where a professor corrected the grammar, punctuation and capitalization in minority students’ assignments. The act of correcting a black student was “micro-aggression,” according to the members of the student group “Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color,” which launched a sit-in during a subsequent meeting of the class. “A hostile campus climate has been the norm for Students of Color in this class throughout the quarter as our epistemological and methodological commitments have been repeatedly questioned by our classmates and our...