Free Republic

Several federal agencies are accelerating hiring in the final days of the Obama administration to ensure that as many new employees as possible are in place before President-elect Donald Trump imposes a promised hiring freeze. Leaders at these agencies are filling open positions with transfers and outside hires and are making internal promotions before Trump takes office Jan. 20, according to internal documents and interviews. The hiring could increase tensions between the Trump transition team and the Obama administration — a relationship that has grown worse in recent days due to disagreements over how the United States should handle its...

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Republicans are poised to use their newly attained capitol dominance to make Missouri the 27th right-to-work state prohibiting mandatory union fees. That is unless Kentucky's recently crowned GOP majorities can beat them to it. The race to expand right-to-work laws is just one of several ways that Republicans, who strengthened their grip on power in the November elections, are preparing to reshape state laws affecting workplaces, classrooms, courtrooms and more during 2017.

In late October of this year, then candidate Trump gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in which he outlined his plan for his first 100 days in office. It included three major areas of focus: cleaning up corruption in Washington, job creation and what many called a “law and order” agenda. The speech was reported on and then largely forgotten. So what should black Americans be looking for in the first 100 days of a Trump presidency? I believe we should press for three major priorities, which are very compatible with what Trump has already put forth: a growing economy...

An age-discrimination lawsuit filed by two people who interviewed unsuccessfully for jobs at Google could expand to encompass other individuals if a motion filed this week is successful.http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2016/06/30/google-age-discrimination-lawsuit-could-grow.html

...(Via Bloomberg) IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty said she plans to hire about 25,000 people in the U.S. and invest $1 billion over the next four years, laying out her vision for filling technology jobs in America on the eve of a meeting of industry leaders with President-elect Donald Trump. Rometty, who is on Trump’s advisory panel of business leaders, will join Facebook Inc.’s Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon.com Inc.’s Jeff Bezos and Alphabet Inc.’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt at a summit with Trump Wednesday in New York that is said to focus on jobs.

When Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, the man dubbed "Trump of the East", told U.S. businesses to pack their bags if they didn't like his anti-American rhetoric, the huge and growing outsourcing industry got a little nervous. It's now the real Donald Trump who has businesses worried here, after the U.S. president-elect vowed to bring offshored jobs home from places such as the Philippines, a big provider of back-office services for corporate America. The Southeast Asian country accounts for 12.6 percent of the global market for business-process outsourcing (BPO), which has been growing 10 percent a year for the past decade,...

President Barack Obama’s top labor arbiters have overturned a cumulative 4,500 years of legal precedent over the past eight years, according to a new study. The National Labor Relations Board, an agency that oversees union elections and workplace disputes, has issued numerous new rules that changed longstanding agency practices, as well as issued decisions that overturned decades of precedent. In all, the board has overturned 91 precedents, wiping out more than 4,000 years of case law—averaging more than 45 years per decision; the agency’s new election rules overturned a combined 454 years of protocol, according to a study from three...

GOP leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, have quietly ended an unpopular 2015 program to annually outsource another 198,000 blue-collar jobs to lower-paid foreign workers.

<p>Ford Motor Co. is willing to work with Donald Trump to keep jobs in the U.S. if he puts the right policies in place, the automaker’s chief executive officer said.</p> <p>“We will be very clear in the things we’d like to see,” Mark Fields said in an exclusive interview at Bloomberg offices in Southfield, Michigan. “We’ll continue to advocate for currency-manipulation rules to promote free and fair trade. One of our priorities is making sure fuel-economy standards reflect market realities, tax reform in general we would be very supportive of, and the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles.”</p>

The U.S. economy likely added 175,000 jobs last month as the unemployment rate held steady at 4.9%, Wall Street economists are estimating ahead of Friday's employment report out at 8:30 a.m. ET. The economy has a bit of momentum, the Federal Reserve is set to hike rates in two weeks and nothing in Friday's jobs report can possibly change that. The real issue for markets is all about expectations. Investors are beginning to assess what the Trump fiscal package of tax cuts and infrastructure spending means for growth as well as inflation... ...in every single jobs report from here on...

It’s not uncommon for a Republican to be pro-business. But President-elect Donald Trump showed Tuesday night he’s pro-worker, too, by saving 1,000 jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana. His standing up for the blue-collar workers who helped get him elected is no small feat, even for the very accomplished billionaire, who has a long record of delivering under budget and on time. Sure, it’s unusual for a president-elect to interject himself in the economic mechanizations of a specific company — let alone the economy writ large — but everything about Trump being the next president is unusual... The brutally...

Jamiel Shaw Sr. has been fighting the lonely battle against illegal immigration since 2008, when his 17-year-old son, Jamiel Shaw Jr., was gunned down in broad daylight by illegal alien gang members in the sanctuary city of Los Angeles. It was determined at trial that Jamiel Jr., who had no criminal record or ever any history with gangs, was targeted and killed due to the color of his skin. The elder Shaw helped create Jamiel’s Law, a proposed ordinance to deport known illegal alien gang members, and has testified before Congress multiple times on the matter. But after years of...

From realDonaldTrump Twitter feed: "I am working hard, even on Thanksgiving, trying to get Carrier A.C. Company to stay in the U.S. (Indiana). MAKING PROGRESS - Will know soon!"

I’m an Enrolled Agent tax pro based in California with clients all over the country. Recently, the son of a client who had moved to a more free state than ours asked whether I thought he should move back here to start a business. I suggested not. Why? While California suffers from the highest income tax rate in the country and mountains of regulations that cause everything from housing costs to the price of power to be among the highest, the most destructive regulation of all is arguably an up-and-coming one. It mandates annual increases to the minimum prices of...

As another month passes, the great schism inside the American labor force get wider. We are referring to the unprecedented divergence between the total number of high-paying manufacturing jobs, and minimum-wage food service and drinking places jobs, also known as waiters and bartenders. In October, according to the BLS, while the number of people employed by "food services and drinking places" rose by another 10,000, the US workforce lost another 9,000 manufacturing workers.

Despite indications that the Houston hemorrhage of oil and gas jobs has slowed down, the two-year old wave of advances in drilling and extraction technologies—pioneered by now-jobless engineers—will prevent rehiring from commencing any time soon. Last week—and for the first time in over a year—oilfield services company Halliburton reported a quarterly profit. The profit was small in size, but refreshingly hopeful for Houston’s long-ailing oil and gas job market. Months of job cuts and asset sales later, the company announced a slim $6 million profit and a stable global workforce at 50,000 employees. A full ten percent of the 3,500...

resident Barack Obama is doing anything but closing out his lame duck term quietly. On the contrary he’s doing yet another end run around both the U.S. Congress and all 50 states that would impose another mandate that will cost money and jobs, possibly forcing states to raise taxes as well. Twenty-one states have filed a federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Sherman, Texas, to stop him. Hours after the states filed their lawsuit, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other business groups filed a similar lawsuit with the same federal court. Obama’s new mandate would force employers in...

The "quiet catastrophe" is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14%. If the labor force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs. The work rate for adult men...

AUSTIN - The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division says it found numerous violations in Austin’s restaurant industry, in that owners violated federal labor law by not paying workers the wages they were legally owed. The Labor Department said the division found violations in 95 percent of its investigations of Austin-area restaurants between Oct. 1, 2015 and June 30, 2016. The percentage of violations found was down from 98 percent in fiscal year 2015. “The current level of noncompliance found in these investigations is not acceptable,” said Dr. David Weil, administrator of the Wage and Hour Division in...

Anyone who pays any attention knows that something unusual is happening to employment. Good full time jobs are disappearing, being replaced by lower paying and part time jobs. Experts and especially politicians have explanations and excuses: Offshoring to lower labor countries, excessive rules and regulations, illegal aliens, lack of education in the workforce…. The list goes on and on. What I rarely hear: automation. When most people hear “automation,” they think “robots.” Most robots are dedicated and expensive and don’t replace that many people. “Automation” or computer control is what gets the majority of the jobs, and it is not...