Free Republic

Largest U.S. labor union not ready to back Hillary Clinton 2016 White House bid The country’s largest labor union won’t endorse any Democrat who has the same economic team as President Obama and won’t be getting behind Hillary Rodham Clinton early in the 2016 presidential race, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Thursday. “If you get the same economic team, you’re going to get the same results. The same results aren’t good enough for working people,” he said.

The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell for a second straight week last week, underscoring the strengthening labor market fundamentals. Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slipped 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 298,000 for the week ended Aug. 23, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims for the prior week were revised to show 1,000 more applications received than previously reported. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims climbing to 300,000 last week. A Labor Department analyst said there were no special factors influencing the state level data. The four-week average of claims, considered a better measure...

<p>Texas has surpassed 300,000 jobs in the oil and natural gas sector as the oil boom drives job growth for a fourth straight year.</p> <p>According to the data released this week by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the state gained more than 20,000 oil and gas jobs since July 2013, its largest increase since April 2013.</p>

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is running for governor of that state, has rolled out a plan that would repeal a number of occupational licensing rules. These standards restrict individuals from engaging in certain commerce without permission from the state (and often include paying extra money, taking tests, and meeting other requirements). The plan notes, “Regulation by licensure results in less competition, fewer choices, higher costs, and the potential to thwart innovation. These effects are not always visible to the consumer, but they are nonetheless built-in costs without justification in most instances.” The National Center for Policy Analysis notes,...

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...

Truck driver Anthony Plummer remembers when he was in the middle of the country on a long-haul delivery when he learned his daughter was sick in the hospital. “I was told to get back [home] as soon as possible. But there are a lot of rules that limit how much I can drive, so I told them I would get back as soon as I could.” It was after this incident that Plummer decided to make a career shift to become a regional truck driver. “It blew my mind if something were to happen and if I was way across...

We've written repeatedly about the many flaws of the 2009 "Cash for Clunkers" program. It made used cars more expensive, wasted resources and merely shifted people's car-buying plans forward a few months. Now, a new study by three Texas A&M University economists says the misguided stimulus policy wasn't even good for the auto industry. Mark Hoekstra, Steven L. Puller and Jeremy West find that the program's fuel-efficiency constraints induced people to purchase smaller, less expensive cars than they would otherwise have bought.

Yellen picked through the various arguments over what the seemingly contradictory data says: the faster-than-expected fall in the jobless rate to 6.2 percent from 7.3 percent a year ago, against the persistently extremely low labor force participation rate since the Great Recession, just 62.9 percent. Yellen agreed that there have been some structural changes that have affected the way the labor market signals tightening through indicators such as part-time work, the number of people leaving jobs, and wage gains - which have been virtually insignificant since the recession ended in 2009. But she insisted that the combined data that the...

More than a thousand locals lined up Friday morning for several hours under the scorching sun and heat in Miami for a box full of food. The event located at the Central Shopping Plaza at 3825 NW 7th Street started at 9:00 a.m.

Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm will teach one course this fall at the University of California-Berkeley. It’s called “Creating Jobs through Better Government Policies for Innovation and Education.” That is the only class Granholm will teach in the fall. In the spring, she’s listed as contributing to another course in Public Policy taught by another instructor. Granholm is listed as earning $84,331 in 2013 at the college. Granholm’s husband, Daniel Mulhern, is listed as earning $180,000 in gross pay in 2013 and is schedule to teach one class in the fall and two courses in the spring. For the Record:...

Fewer people applied for U.S. unemployment benefits last week, another sign the job market is improving. The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly claims for jobless aid fell 14,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 298,000. The prior week’s figures were revised up slightly to 311,000. The less-volatile four-week average rose 4,750 to 300,750. It remains close to levels that predate the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Applications are a proxy for layoffs. Employers aren’t just keeping workers. They’re hiring at a pace last seen during the tech boom. They added 209,000 jobs in July, the sixth straight month that job...

The Schiller Park, Ill., bakery, where Twinkies were invented in 1930, will close according to an announcement by Hostess Brands on Wednesday....

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Weston, the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, stopped at a Hobby Lobby store in her district on Wednesday – not to pick up some craft supplies for one of her kid’s school projects, but to alert people to the store’s existence and urge people not to shop there. “I want people to know that this Hobby Lobby is here and they should vote with their purses and their pocketbooks, and women should not shop here. If you didn’t know this Hobby Lobby was here before, know it now and don’t shop here. They don’t...

EAST HARTFORD — Vice President Joe Biden visited Goodwin College on Wednesday to draw attention to the ways that job training, when it's guided by industry, can help people move into higher-paying jobs and strengthen the middle class. He praised the college's year-old manufacturing production training program and its ambitious expansion of manufacturing training this fall.

The campaign season has been filled with claims from candidates that they will create jobs. A common strategy is to target a business or an industry for special state support and to claim credit whenever jobs are added by companies receiving support. A quick look at the job creation and loss figures for the economy as a whole shows that this approach is not a workable one. There is a surprising amount of job creation and loss in the economy. Michigan added 214,000 jobs and lost 194,000 jobs in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the Bureau of Labor...

Target Corp. lowered its outlook for the year.... The big-box retailer, which also posted a 62% decline in earnings for its second quarter, has been trying to bounce back from the data breach over the holiday season. The company booked expenses tied to the fumble of $148 million in the latest quarter....

The government's latest survey of job openings and labor turnover implies that while the U.S. labor market has improved significantly since the recession, it is far from having recovered. The key determinant of labor market health is hiring, and hiring remains well below normal. The data-rich Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, which Fed chair Janet Yellen is said to follow closely, reports monthly hires and separations, with the separation defined as the termination of an employment relationship for any reason. The hiring and separation numbers reveal important but little-known facts about how the U.S. labor market operates....

Complaints about a “skills gap” that make it difficult for employers to fill open positions have become commonplace in discussions about the economy and unemployment levels. Workers, the story goes, simply don’t have the educational background or professional training for the kinds of jobs that exist in today’s knowledge economy. The argument certainly feels like it makes sense – things have changed an awful lot in the past decade, and it could be that older workers simply don’t have the necessary skills for employment today. The trouble is that economists have become increasingly skeptical about the skills gap narrative, not...

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...