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Disney ABC Television Group reversed a decision to lay off about 35 tech workers this week, following recent reports that Disney laid off hundreds of tech workers in January after forcing them to train their replacements. Two weeks ago, Disney ABC told a team of between 30 and 35 application developers they were being laid off, some at the end of July, and that their jobs were going to an IT contractor with large offshore operations, reported Computer World. But on Thursday, Disney ABC told the workers plans had changed and they would not be laid off. Some of the...

Ever heard of the Luddites, who took their name from Ned Ludd? They were English textile workers who protested, from 1811 to 1816, against the development and implementation of labor-saving technologies....... .... Robots are causing a new Industrial Revolution..... [SNIP] ....Liberals are even proposing the regulation of technological advancement..... .........One aspect of the massive agrarian job loss in America was that the unemployed farm workers did not sit idle. Instead of lamenting their fate, waiting for government to do something and/or take care of them, they took advantage of the fact that new technology created hundreds of millions of jobs...

During the Great Recession, involuntary part-time employment surged. So, now that the economy is recovering, shouldn't involuntary employment return to prerecession levels? Perhaps not, according to new research from the San Francisco Fed. Changes in the U.S. economy's industrial composition toward services combined with shifting demographics and changes in labor costs appear to have caused a permanent increase in the percentage of people forced to accept involuntary part-time employment.

Did you know the U.S. government has rolled out a big new federal program to revive the U.S. manufacturing sector? The proposed budget for this new effort now surpasses $2.4 billion, and, surprisingly, it has received a level of bipartisan support that hasn't been seen for years, if not decades, for manufacturing. This new program has a big mouthful of a name -- the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation or NNMI -- and it's targeted at correcting one of the most fundamental weaknesses in America's manufacturing infrastructure: our waning competitiveness in manufacturing technologies. I call this project "top secret" because...

Whether it's a potential employer, current employer, budding romantic partner, long-time significant other, or someone else in your life, there's a good chance they have or will run a Google search for your name. Do you know everything that they'll find? The answer could make a difference between a job and the unemployment line, or ‘happily ever after’ and nights alone. That's why you need to run your own search first. Search Google for more than mentions Start with a basic search for your name in quotes, like "Kim Komando,” for instance. If you have a more common name, you...

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Gallup's U.S. Job Creation Index reached +32 for the month of May, the highest Gallup has found, by one point, since 2008. It slightly exceeds the +31 found in April, and the +30 found in September 2014. Shortly after Gallup began tracking job creation in January 2008, the index nosedived as the Great Recession wreaked havoc on the economy. After remaining in negative territory for most of 2009, the index slowly recovered, reaching +30 in September 2014. It then dipped slightly and stayed between +27 and +29 for six months. More recently, it increased two points in...

The elephants in the room lumber about, undisturbed by politicians or people of vision. The hard issues of the economy are well known. Politicians, bureaucracies, CEOs and trade union leaders have dealt the the issues of productivity, unemployment, competition from east and west, the collapse of industries through the decades of the 20th, and now the 21st, centuries. Yet these are harder now. Intelligent systems, robotic manufacturing, driverless vehicles, online services, all carve deep into established trades. In the post-war decades, every time a new technology came along, the feared bonfire of jobs didn’t happen — or only briefly and...

Tucked away in the pages of a new report by the U.S. General Accounting Office is a startling statistic: 40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of contingent workers—that is, people who don’t have what we traditionally consider secure jobs. There is currently a lot of debate about how contingent workers should be defined. To arrive at the 40.4 %, which the workforce reached in 2010, the report counts the following types of workers as having the alternative work arrangements considered contingent. (The government did some rounding to arrive at its final number, so the numbers below add...

Every time the liberal media discovers that the racial composition of any particular company or industry does not reflect the population of the United States, immediately millions of gallons of ink (or digital ink) are shed as the media frantically searches for signs of inherent racism. Just look at this recent article worrying that not enough black directors were making Super Bowl ads. But in a curious article in the New York Times, the Times mentions an enormous racial disparity only second-handedly, and doesn't seem concerned about the nature of it, because the recipients of it are not white, but...

Wise words from Warren Buffett. The Oracle of Omaha predicts how the rush to sharply raise the minimum wage will end. (Spoiler: badly for the people the policy purports to help.) And Buffett also offers a smart alternative to help low-income workers: In my mind, the country's economic policies should have two main objectives. First, we should wish, in our rich society, for every person who is willing to work to receive income that will provide him or her a decent lifestyle. Second, any plan to do that should not distort our market system, the key element required for growth...

While we constantly analyze short-term data, the industry has a longer-term problem. And it is not related to what lies below the ground. There is a retirement tidal wave that could wash over the oil and gas industry over the next few years. The seeds of this crisis were planted in the late 1980’s after the last major oil bust. Oil prices crashed after Saudi Arabia became fed up with losing market share, and beginning around 1986, it pumped flat out in order to force out other producers. The price of oil crashed and a lot of US drillers cut...

Twenty-seven senators want President Obama to block federal agencies and contractors from asking job applicants about prior criminal convictions. The senators, including 26 Democrats and presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), want Obama to take executive action to "ban the box," referring to a question on job applications that asks if an applicant has any convictions. "We ask you to require federal contractors and agencies to refrain from asking job applicants about prior convictions until later in the hiring process," they said in a letter to Obama on Monday. "This policy would eliminate unnecessary barriers to employment for all job...

Earlier we reported that all the jobs added in April were part-time, or over 400,000, while full-time jobs decreased by over 200,000 pushing them further under the pre-recession peak. Here is another stunning data point: while it has been no secret that ever since the quote-unquote recovery virtually all job gains have gone to older workers, those 55 and over and ever closer to retirement, April merely confirmed this demographically disastrous trend, and of the 255K workers added in the household survey when broken down by age group, more than all, or 266K went to workers aged 55 and older...

A new report released by the Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) says that only 16 percent of 15- to 17-year-old teens in Baltimore have been raised in an intact, married family. The report, released Wednesday and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is “one of the five least intact counties of America,” along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn. The report cites studies indicating that children who grow up in intact, married families are...

When he came to office, not unlike other politicians, Obama made many promises. Nearly every promise he made has remained unfulfilled — with one exception: The promise that “change has come to America.” My dad used to tell me that nothing was so good it could not be better or be so bad it could not get worse. Things have indeed gotten worse, much worse, and it would appear that there is no bottom as to how far we may ultimately fall at the hands of an administration and politicians from both sides of the aisle, who only care about...

Folks, there is exactly one way you're going to put a stop to this sort of nonsense: At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015. Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room,...

Wisconsin ranks 40th in the nation for job growth, or so says a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. Many in the media and political circles pounced on the release as evidence that the policies of Republican Gov. Scott Walker, a potential presidential candidate, have left the Badger State trailing much of the nation. But the report failed to give sufficient context to Wisconsin’s job growth. The BLS, along with other reports touting similar results, ranked states based on how much private employment increased over a year. Why might Wisconsin’s employment increase seem modest? One reason could be that more...

Rising immigration from the 1820s to the Civil War drove down wages for free black Americans and immigrants alike. Jeffrey Williamson and Peter Lindert's macroeconomic history shows that between 1816 and 1856, the American Northeast was transformed from the "Jeffersonian ideal" to a society more typical of developing economies with marked income inequality and very low wages for laborers. As badly as new immigrants often were treated by established Americans, even worse treatment was meted out to black Americans by the immigrants. Organizing themselves into trade unions, immigrant laborers helped set the terms of hiring at many urban workplaces. Not...

Employers in 31 U.S. states cut jobs last month as weak economic growth weighed on hiring and a slowdown in oil and gas drilling caused big job losses in some states. The Labor Department said Tuesday that unemployment rates rose or were unchanged in 27 states and fell in 23 states. Eighteen states gained jobs, while employment was unchanged in Idaho.

Commentary By Portrait of Patrick Tyrrell Patrick Tyrrell There was good news this month: private-sector job openings rose slightly in February, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Openings rose to 3.8 percent of all private-sector jobs and the job openings—the highest rate since January 2001. Other data for the month showed the unemployment rate for workers age 25-54 (often called prime age workers) ticked downward to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent.