Free Republic

MEGAN THOMPSON: Great news for the divorced 58-year-old father and professional driver who needed the extra money to help pay child support. Jones filled out the paperwork, submitted a drug test and waited to hear when he could start. Instead, he got a different kind of call. KEVIN JONES: And Human Resources said, “There’s a problem with your background check.” And I said, “What problem?” “Yeah, there’s some criminal stuff going on. You need to talk to them.” MEGAN THOMPSON: It turned out the background check – conducted by a company now called Sterling BackCheck – showed convictions for drunk...

America has a deficit of workers. Willing workers. Capable workers. Skilled, or at least semi-skilled workers, who can do a job and do it well. There are at least one million jobs that go begging day after day if only employers could find workers to fill them. This probably seems hard-to-believe. After all, how can America have a worker shortage when we have about 18 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed? When the real unemployment rate is 12 percent? Well certainly the economy isn’t creating nearly as many jobs as it should – in large part because of regulatory...

SEATTLE - Popular online retailer Zulily is planning to add about 900 jobs in central Ohio as part of new tax credit deal from the state. The Seattle-based company says most of the positions at the new call center will be in customer service. The move is expected to generate $28 million by 2017. This comes in addition to Zulily’s existing facility in Obetz. As part of a tax agreement, the Ohio Development Services Agency says the company will receive a 75%, 12-year tax credit in exchange for operating in Ohio for at least 15 years. Zulily is an online...

A blockbuster new poll obtained by Breitbart News reveals that a majority of likely voters want to push the pause button on massive immigration, which allowed legal immigrants a chance to more fully assimilate while the middle class expanded as wages increased. As President Barack Obama considers giving more guest-worker permits to companies that have laid off American workers and granting temporary work permits and executive amnesty to millions of more illegal immigrants, a comprehensive survey found that a majority of likely voters want even fewer legal immigrants. The poll found that "half of Americans age 65 and over" and...

The Deloitte University Press has a very interesting, and comprehensive study on job gains and losses, by type of job, and state by state. The biggest winners are states involved in energy production, finance, or healthcare. The biggest losers are states that did not recover from the real estate bust, or lost population due to emigration. With that overview, let's dive deeper into the Geography of Jobs. Only now, as we reach the fifth anniversary of the end of the recession, has employment in the United States finally regained its pre-recession peak. The national story of slow recovery obscures the...

The Labor Department just released statistics that show that job openings in June are at a 13-year high. But while hiring is also up, it's not nearly at the levels that the job openings are. For job-hunters, the disconnect can be frustrating and painful. What's going on, and how can you get around this? * Not all jobs posted will be filled. Sometimes businesses post jobs with no intention of actually filling them. They're looking for applicants to put in their files so that they have a supply of candidates when a job does open up. Sometimes, positions are posted,...

One of the dividing lines between liberals and conservatives has always been the understanding of how economics works. Conservatives know how economics works; the force of supply and demand as well the true value of work. Liberals are like children who see the last twenty dollar bill in their mom’s wallet and say “Yippee, we’re rich! Let’s go to McDonald’s.” Last week the child-like liberals dropped their “I’m-so-intelligent-because-I’m-on-television” masks and let us see how dumb they really are. Led down the path of stupid is as stupid says, Savannah Guthrie reported that a Minnesota restaurant has added a new line...

According to a new report by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Americans are earning 23% less today than what they made before the 2008 recession for the same jobs. This terrible statistic doesn’t even take into account Americans still struggling with unemployment, and please remember that the real unemployment rate is over 20%. That figure reflects all the Americans who’ve given up even looking for jobs that just aren’t there in Obama’s economy. This issue of middle class wage stagnation is directly related to the current debate about amnesty. According to a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, 70% of Americans believe illegal...

On the surface, California's job market is booming. The state has now recovered all the jobs lost during the recession, and done so at a faster pace than all but five states. The growth, though, belies a troubling imbalance. The fastest job creation has come in low-wage sectors, in which pay has declined. At the high end of the salary scale, a different dynamic has taken hold: rising pay and improving employment after rounds of consolidation. Most distressing, middle-wage workers are losing out on both counts. "People talk about it like an hourglass," said Tracey Grose, vice president of the...

Four in 10 U.S. households are straining financially five years after the Great Recession — many struggling with tight credit, soaring education debt and profound issues related to savings and retirement, according to a new Federal Reserve survey. The wide-ranging Fed study assessing the economic well-being of Americans shows that the economy has made progress to the point where most households said they were "living comfortably" or doing OK financially. But almost 40% reported last fall that their families were "just getting by" or struggling to do so, and more people said their financial situation was worse rather than better...

A new Seattle-based startup called Poachable wants to play matchmaker—not with your love life, but with your career.Poachable’s online book of possible employee-employer matches may well change the way people engage with the often dreaded and largely outdated process of searching for a job. But it’s more of a flirtation with the idea of finding a new job than a mission to marry a new job as soon as possible. It’s the Tinder of the online job search, not Match.com.Poachable cofounder Tom Leung, a former Microsoft and Google employee, may well have identified the new "sweet spot" in recruiting. As...

Five years ago talent was plentiful, companies could easily recruit for supply chain planners, and it was easier to recruit supply chain graduates - Not so today. The biggest issues are in mid-management roles. Let’s examine some of the facts from recent research. Today, 60% of companies have open positions. Fifteen percent of the planning positions are open for an average time of five months. An IBM surveys report that 51% of companies are seeing an increase in turnover of supply chain leaders. Have I convinced you yet to be worried? If so, let’s start working on an answer. Let...

If unemployment benefits were cut off earlier in 2013, the long-term unemployed would have been more likely to be re-employed, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. If the benefits, called the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, expired earlier in 2013, “workers with 46 or more weeks of continuous unemployment would have been 1.2 to 2.1 percentage points more likely to become re-employed,” the St. Louis Fed reported. “Similarly, the long-term unemployed would have been 0.4 to 0.5 percentage points more likely to exit the labor force entirely.”

SEATTLE (VR) – Does raising the minimum wage kill jobs? Most probably not. Does it increase jobs? We don’t know for sure, but it might. Or at least these are the inferences one is likely to make from a recent report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. It turns out that 12 out of 13 states that raised their minimum wage on January 1, 2013 are experiencing increases in employment. The report also states that the average change in employment for these 13 states is +.99% while the average change in employment in the remaining states is +.68%....

WMBF in Myrtle Beach, SC, reported Wednesday on the growing trend of businesses hiring only part-time workers, due to an inability to afford Obamacare. This situation leaves workers without healthcare and without a full-time income or other benefits. Local staffing agencies say more small business are starting to hire more part time employees. Not because there is more full time work, but as WMBF reporter Mandy Noell found out, it's because they can't afford to have more full time employees. Obamacare places requirements for health care benefits that many small businesses just cannot afford to pay. As a result, they...

Since 1994 there has been no official measure than includes discouraged people who have not looked for a job for more than a year. Including all discouraged workers produces an unemployment rate that currently stands at 23.1%, almost four times the rate that the financial press reports.

The first quarter contraction, especially our corrected number, implies a second quarter negative real GDP. In other words, the years of Quantitative Easing (money printing) by the Federal Reserve has not resulted in economic recovery from the 2008 downturn and has not prevented further contraction.

$1.7 billion plan to preach humanity's 'goodness'The federal program Job Corps will tap into a proposed $1.7 billion budget not simply to provide career-development services to at-risk men and women but to raise awareness of the “inherent goodness” found in each human being. The money will be spent to make people feel good. The “I Am Somebody” initiative for fiscal year 2015 will teach appreciation of “ethnic diversity” in response to problems among job training and other employment-assistance recipients, according to the project Statement of Work, or SOW, which WND located via routine database research. “Recently Job Corps students have...

When President Obama took office in 2009, the U.S. economy was in the midst of the Great Recession of 2008. Five and a half years later, that historic swoon remains his excuse for continued economic stagnation. Whoever or whatever is to blame, neither his efforts nor luck nor a natural rebound have managed to restore America's job market to what it was in better times. The July 3 jobs report was a reminder that the economy is at least creating jobs again, albeit at a rate that barely keeps up with population growth. And national and state unemployment rates have...

1. Historically, when Capacity Utilization is as high as its now (suggesting not much industrial slack) the inflation rate has been much higher. 2. According to survey data from the National Federation of Independent Businesses, more and more companies are saying they can't find qualified applicants for job openings. 3. Survey data shows a big increase in the number of businesses who say they plan to raise wages in the future.