Free Republic

There they the ones who aren't are exceptions. In fact, John Crudele is one of the exceptions. He had a story in the New York Post detailing how that 7.9% number was entirely made up. He did a column on how it was created, how it was artificially manufactured, and how they massaged it to make it 7.9%. He did a piece on how it was illegitimate, and he had been warning prior to the number how they were gonna do it. So he did a column detailing how they did it and so forth. But my guess is most...

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell struggled to get something off her chest during Sunday’s Meet the Press.... ......“You know — I’m not echoing Reince Priebus, because he is obviously partisan, and that’s his job,” she said haltingly. “But if you look at all the reporting from the jobs data on Friday reported that participation rates are at historic lows, decades lows. Fifty-nine percent are not involved in the labor force. That’s just not a sustainable recovery.”

Interested why despite the euphoric headline NFP print, a cursory glance deeper inside the payrolls report reveals weakness after weakness, with both participation plunging again and wages the worst since last summer?

One in five U.S. workers was laid off in the past five years and about 22% of those who lost their jobs still haven't found another one, according to a new survey that showed the extent Americans have struggled in the sluggish labor market since the Great Recession ended. http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-layoffs-unemployment-jobs-economy-20140924-story.html

In an apparent attempt to advise investors on how they can take advantage of America’s transformation into a neo-feudal oligarchy in a 50-page research report, Morgan Stanley has put together some very interesting charts.. We will be sharing many of them in the next few days but none is more telling and depressing than the one that shows how the U.S. leads the developed world in the share of low wage jobs...

Apparently the only jobs college accreditation reviewers are interested in are their own, not those of recent college graduates. “Accreditation has become a roadblock to reform,” Hank Brown, the former president of the University of Colorado, said at the Heritage Foundation yesterday, “a system that leads to majors that go nowhere.” I asked him whether college accreditation boards even considered the post-graduation employment of graduates as an afterthought in their reviews. “I’ve seen very few accreditation ratings that focus on that,” he said. “I think that would be of great value.” Brown is also the former president of the University...

Well, the HiTech RedNeck is looking for a job... AGAIN. This job hopping is getting old, but the boss of the group, at a major freight railroad, for which I'm a contractor has an integrity problem, to put it delicately. For some reason, I don't get along very well with liars and phonies. Well, I refreshed my resumes on Dice and Monster this past weekend and crossed my fingers. Well this morning what do I behold, but someone wants to know if I am interested in working for a company that turns out to be BLOOMBERG MEDIA. They are quoting...

The U.S. is planning to train veterans to become solar panel installers in the next six years, the White House said Thursday. The jobs training program is among a host of initiatives the White House says will cut carbon dioxide emissions by more than 300 million tons through 2030, plus save billions of dollars on energy bills for homeowners and businesses. It will launch this fall at one or more military bases and train a total of at least 50,000, including veterans....

[SNIP] All of which brings us to the latest popular lament among pundits, politicians, and even some in the business world: the perceived lack of engineers and/or ‘STEM’ (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) graduates. President Obama has said “We need more engineers,” so has Hillary Clinton, and then Lockheed Martin executive Stephanie Hill recently stated that “we’ll lose” if we don’t produce at least 1 million more ‘STEM’ grads. About all the handwringing, readers can relax. Indeed, there’s nothing to this story or alleged shortage. Price signals work. They always do, and they do because one of the underlying purposes...

FERGUSON • In less than half an hour, thousands of people arrived, dressed in jeans and suits, with their résumés in hand. The line to get into a room where dozens of potential employers sat waiting was at least 45 minutes long. A job fair sponsored by the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis on Saturday drew about 5,000. The event, held at St. Louis Community College’s Florissant Valley campus, was supposed to end at 2 p.m. But it ran more than an hour long just so everyone who had waited in line could interview. Damon Williams, 38, said frustration...

There is a new form of cyberbullying out there and it is scary, because it could derail the professional career of any conservative - even those working in apolitical jobs. Slimy folks like “Busta Troll” are hijacking Facebook pages of conservatives, replacing the content with goats and anti-conservative messages. Some believe a goat is used because it is a Satanic symbol; many of the conservatives are targeted because of their Christian or Jewish views. The conservative Citizens’ Post page on Facebook was hijacked by the “Goatz Alliance,” which also goes by the name “Busta Troll,” by pretending to be from...

"MCDonalds Mcdonalds, can't you see...Seven-forty is not for me..." The chant, recited through a megaphone, was being led by a man identifed as a Christian Pastor ("Reverend Charles" we'll call him), near a McDonalds restaurant in Detroit last week. Dozens of people in the parking lot uttered the chant with him, as the crowd sought to malign McDonalds restaurants while at the same time demanding a $15.00 per hour wage. "They want fifteen, they want a union, they want to be organized" Pastor Charles told the tv news crews. "The McDonalds corporation should allow that to happen immediately." The illogic...

new report shows some 53 million Americans—or 34 percent of the U.S. workforce—are now working as freelancers in some capacity. "This is more than an economic change," asserts the report, a joint effort from the Freelancer's Union and freelance markeplaces oDesk and eLance. It's also "a cultural and social shift" that will "have major impacts on how Americans conceive of and organize their lives, their communities, and their economic power." The first and last time anyone looked at the freelance worker population in the U.S. was 2004, in a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Back then the GAO...

(CNSNews.com) - The number of foreign-born individuals holding jobs in the United States hit a recorded high of 24,639,000 in August, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS has been tracking the number of foreign-born workers annually since 2005 and monthly since 2007. The BLS does not distinguish between foreign-born individuals who are in the United States legally and those who are here illegally. “The foreign born are those who reside in the United States but who were born outside the country or one of its outlying areas to parents who were not U.S. citizens,”...

Complete headline: Labor Participation Rate Drops To Lowest Since 1978; People Not In Labor Force Rise To Record 92.3 Million It is almost as if the Fed warned us this would happen. In a note released yesterday, a Fed working paper titled "Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects", looked at the US labor force and concluded that "while we see some of the current low level of the participation rate as indicative of labor market slack, we do not expect the participation rate to show a substantial increase from current levels as labor market conditions continue to improve."...

Americans pride themselves on an egalitarian society open to all. But some equality and inequality exist uneasily side by side. And the U.S. has never resolved this contradiction.If the world is lucky enough to produce historians of the early 21st century, one question seems certain to grab their attention. How did so much equality coexist with so much inequality? Economic inequality—the difference between the richest and the poorest, or between the rich and everyone else —has reached some of its highest levels ever, both in the U.S. and at around the world. Yet our time is also marked by a...

The total number of working-age (16 to 65) immigrants (legal and illegal) holding a job in North Carolina increased by 313,000 from the first quarter of 2000 to the first quarter of 2014...The number of working-age natives with a job declined by 32,000 over the same time.

Hoping to get some advice from FReepers who are hiring managers for tech positions - specifically system/network admins. I've been in the field for almost 25 years. Been consistently employed with a consistently rising salary. Now mid 40s and currently employed. But I would like to relocate to another city where we own property. I don't know anyone there other than our neighbors who are either retired, farmers, or both. The area I'm looking at is Parkersburg WV. Not exactly a mecca of tech positions, but a few pop up occasionally on the job boards. I've been sending out resumes...

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...