Free Republic

A study commissioned by the National Black Chamber of Commerce, which represents 2.1 million black-owned businesses in the United States, found that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Power Plan would increase black poverty by 23 percent and cause the loss of 7 million jobs for black Americans by 2035. The study also found that the EPA' plan would increase Hispanic poverty by 26 percent and cause the loss of 12 million jobs for Hispanic Americans by 2035. The EPA proposed the Clean Power Plan on June 2, 2014 to cut carbon emissions from power plants. ... There was a...

A former Hillary Clinton campaign fellow is accusing the Democratic frontrunner of hypocrisy for relying on unpaid interns and fellows while publicly calling to for increased wages. Carolyn Osorio writes in a new USA Today opinion piece that she joined the campaign as a fellow after Clinton announced her bid in April, adding that she had to move to Nevada and work there for free. "I had hoped a trailblazer would be more willing to break the mold of indentured servitude that haunts my generation," she writes. "Finding out that Hillary perpetuates the exploitation known as unpaid internships was like...

Like all the GOP presidential contenders, Scott Walker is being advised by economists and editorial writers to adopt a “cut the top rate first” tax policy. It would be a shame if he followed their advice, which would mean abandoning the approach that he has employed in Wisconsin to such political and economic success. Standard “supply side” tax policy argues that the inventions and advances of the economy’s most active participants drive most growth. Thus, tax policy’s priority should be to encourage more of that activity by lowering the marginal rate on those participants’ income. Since the most economically active...

In an exclusive interview with Breitbart News, GOP presidential candidate and billionaire businessman Donald Trump slammed President Obama’s trade agreements – especially the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) – which Obama argued the United States needs in order to better compete with China. However, according to a recent report by Politico, China may be trying to enter the TPP – defeating Obama’s main argument for finalizing the deal. “Of course China wants to join the trade negotiation because the deal is so pathetic and so bad,” Trump told Breitbart News. He added that China would continue to take advantage of America’s...

Over the past few weeks, the BBC has been reporting on the trends in US manufacturing - the challenges of the digital age, running factories in the city and why young start-up entrepreneurs are attracted to the industry. But what's it like to actually work in manufacturing, making the goods we use on a daily basis? And how has it changed - from Henry Ford's assembly lines to today's cutting edge factory floor? As of May 2015, there were over 12.3 million people - nearly 9% of the total US workforce - engaged in manufacturing everything from Ford Mustangs to...

CoreLogic (CLGX) could create an additional 500 jobs and workers in North Texas as part of it larger consolidation in the region, according to an article in the Dallas Business Journal. The move will combine two centers in the Dallas/Fort Worth area into one, large operations hub. The article said that CoreLogic plans to make the $68 million, 325,600-square-foot campus at 3001 Hackberry Road in Cypress Waters its new regional campus. CoreLogic plans to relocate at least 1,300 full-time positions with an average annual salary of $57,000 from Westlake and Richardson into the new regional campus. In the next four...

Elephant Auto Insurance will add 1,173 jobs at its Henrico County headquarters and will invest $2 million to expand the operation. Governor Terry McAuliffe announced the expansion today in Cardiff, United Kingdom, where he met with officials from Elephant's parent company, U.K.-based Admiral Group PLD. Elephant which had 365 employees at its headquarters in March, was already in a growth mode. In January the company moved from a 32,000-square-foot office on Eastshore Drive in the Innsbrook Corporate Center to a 54,000-square-foot site in the Deep Run I office building at 9950 Mayland Drive.

In a recent editorial, the Detroit Free Press’ Stephen Henderson criticizes policymaking that was supposed to spur job creation, saying that instead “the unemployment has creeped down at alarmingly slow rates.” ForTheRecord says: The drop in the state's unemployment rate from 14.9 percent in June 2009 to 5.4 percent in April 2015 has been among the quickest and steepest drops in Michigan going back to 1976, which is the farthest back comparable monthly data is available. In October 1982, the state's unemployment rate was 16.5 percent. It took the state until December 1988 to get unemployment down to 6.9 percent,...

Last week the Labor Department offered some seemingly very good news: U.S. employers now have more job openings than ever previously recorded. There is a bounty of opportunities to be had. And yet to unemployed workers, it may not feel that way. That’s because many companies are acting like big teases. They say they want to hire, then drag their feet. In fact, the average time required to fill a job opening has also just reached an all-time high: 27.3 days, or almost a month, according to an important and underappreciated monthly data release called the DHI-DFH Mean Vacancy Duration...

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker leads a tight field of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, according to a new survey from Public Policy Polling. Walker is alone in first place in the poll with 17 percent, followed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 15 percent, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) at 13 percent, retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 12 percent and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee at 11 percent. That’s a big jump for Bush, who was at 11 percent support in the same poll last month. However, Bush will begin his quest for the GOP nomination with a negative...

By my reckoning, roughly 60% of the civilian work force is fully employed and 40% are marginally employed or unemployed.Officially, the unemployment rate in the U.S. is 5.6%, meaning 5.6% of the work force is temporarily out of a job and actively seeking another one. This low number reflects nearly full employment, as 3% to 4% of the work force is typically in the process of quitting/being laid off and finding another job. Typically, periods of nearly full employment are economically good times, as household income is bolstered and employers have to pay a bit more to hire workers when...

Declaring to be “the greatest jobs president that God ever created,” billionaire Donald Trump entered the Republican presidential contest today as its 12th candidate.Trump went way off script for the long announcement in New York, starting off with a dig at Rick Perry’s sweaty airplane hangar announcement.“Some of the candidates, they went in. They didn’t know the air-conditioner didn’t work. They sweated like dogs… How are they going to beat ISIS? I don’t think it’s gonna happen,” he said.Mexico, he said, is “laughing at us, at our stupidity” as they import drugs and “rapists” into the United States. “And...

How can it be that the largest pending trade deal in history – a deal backed both by a Democratic president and Republican leaders in Congress – is nearly dead? The Trans Pacific Partnership may yet squeak through Congress but its near-death experience offers an important lesson. It’s not that labor unions have regained political power (union membership continues to dwindle and large corporations have more clout in Washington than ever) or that the President is especially weak (no president can pull off a major deal like this if the public isn’t behind him). The biggest lesson is most Americans...

[snip of long lead-in] "...But the panel did agree on $250 million in cuts to the 26 campuses, including the flagship in Madison. ..The committee also kept Walker's call to remove tenure protections from state law, a proposal that's garnering attention nationally from academics who fear weakening tenure protections will catch on elsewhere. Even with delays and squabbling, Walker is likely to walk away with some big wins: on lifting an enrollment cap on statewide private school vouchers, on new drug screening for public aid recipients and on lower property taxes. Those are all sure-fire crowd pleasers on the Republican...

...Not all that long ago, Gap, Inc. was among the retailers the White House praised for participating in their #RaiseTheWage push:...Obama even visited a Gap store in March of last year to thank them for doing as Democrats instructed.....Let’s check out how that’s coming along just over a year later:

It’s no secret that the American middle class has been on the ropes for a while now. The problem isn’t just a crippling recession and an economic “recovery” that has mostly gone to the richest one percent, but the larger shifting of wealth from the middle to the very top that’s taken place since the late ‘70s. Add in things like the dismantling of unions that has accelerated apace since Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic controllers, and we’ve seen the middle class more solid in places like Canada, Germany, and Scandinavia, and begin to grow in a number of nations...

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) — Conservationists are drawing a line in the scrubland, vowing to fight any attempt by the state to expand logging and cattle grazing throughout Florida's 171 state parks. Florida Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Jon Steverson, appointed in December by Gov. Rick Scott, set off a furor last month when he suggested in a series of newspaper guest columns that Florida expand grazing and timber harvesting in its state parks as a way to offset the cost of running them. In the columns, which ran in newspapers throughout Florida, Steverson said state parks hosted more than 27...

.S.-majority-owned multinational enterprises employed 1,106,700 in Mexico in 2012 (the latest year on record), according to data released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, but Mexican-majority owned enterprises employed only 68,800 in the United States that year. That means that U.S.-controlled multinationals employed 1,037,900 more people in Mexico than Mexican-controlled multinationals employed in the United States. Put another way, multinational enterprises that had a majority U.S. ownership employed 16 times as many people in Mexico as Mexican-controlled multinationals employed in the United States. Forty-nine percent of the jobs--546,500 of 1,106,700--that U.S.-controlled multinationals maintained in Mexico in 2012 were in...

Mike Rowe’s successful Discovery Channel show Dirty Jobs gained a following thanks to being exciting, vivid television: He joined workers as they wrestled alligators, cleaned septic tanks, and rounded up yaks on a ranch in Montana. But it also became something of a tribute to America’s blue-collar work ethic, and as Rowe finishes his second season with a new show on CNN, some can’t help but take exception to his hard-working creed. Rowe was recently moved to make the case for his message after getting a viewer e-mail: “Craig P.” was upset with Rowe’s constant “harping on the ‘work ethic’”...

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...