Free Republic

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell suggested migrants are helping drive rising unemployment during a press conference on Wednesday. Powell spoke to reporters after the Fed announced it would lower its federal funds rate by 0.50% following disappointing job growth in both July and August. Unemployment currently sits at 4.2% — up from 3.4% in April 2023 — in what Powell suggested was largely a product of migrants crossing into the United States. “There’s been quite an influx across the borders, and that is actually one of the things that’s allowed the unemployment rate to rise,” Powell told reporters at the...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says the nation’s unemployment rate is being raised by Alejandro Mayorkas’ huge inflow of migrants. The statement acknowledges the extraordinary political power accumulated by the Cuban-born Secretary of Homeland Security. Mayorkas’ ability to raise and lower the migration rate makes him the nation’s de facto “Labor Czar” and gives him extraordinary influence over Americans’ employment rates, wages and housing, and even their interest rates. Mayorkas insists he has the legal power to set blue-collar and white-collar immigration rates as he sees fit, regardless of migration numbers set by Congress in 1990, or the wishes of...

The organic farm shop is a paradise for wealthy Germans. Behind the scenes, we pick and chop vegetables until we’re on the point of collapse ... they guaranteed work for at least 10 hours a day and that I would be paid €6.20 (£5.27) an hour. I would have to pay the agency a fee of €200 and a one-off sum of €105 for my bed. I would buy and cook my own food. They also told me to bring boots and rubber gloves. ... The contract I sign on about day three probably corresponds to the German labour code....

Vice President Kamala Harris’s tax plan would effectively vaporize nearly 800,000 full-time equivalent jobs, according to studies published by the Tax Foundation Tuesday. Harris’ proposals, including hiking corporate taxes to be among the highest in the developed world, would lower employment by roughly 786,000 full-time equivalent jobs, and reduce long-run gross domestic product (GDP) and wages by 2% and 1.2% respectively, the Tax Foundation found. Meanwhile, Trump’s proposals, including a 60% tariff on China, would lower employment by approximately 387,000 full-time equivalent jobs, lower long-run GDP by 0.2% and increase long-run wages by 0.6%.... ' Trump’s economic plan, including the...

Nine of the 12 Federal Reserve districts reported a decline in economic activity in August, up five districts from the July Beige Book report. Our system has warned that we are entering a period of stagflation, where inflation remains high but GDP declines. Now, the Fed is reporting that two-thirds of the US economy is experiencing “flat or declining activity.” The US economy advanced 3% during the last quarter, leading many to believe that the economy is recovering since Q2 posted a measly 1.4% advancement. Consumer spending, amounting to 70% of GDP, rose 2.9% last quarter as well, but people...

The new August jobs report shows employment numbers of U.S.-born workers and foreign-born workers going on two very different trajectories. Data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an arm of the Department of Labor, shows native-born Americans lost more than 1.3 million jobs over the last 12 months, while foreign-born workers gained more than 1.2 million jobs. The news comes as U.S. job growth picked up in August but missed economists' expectations, while the unemployment rate changed little. As of August of this year, there are 129,712,000 native-born workers compared to 131,031,000 in August 2023, meaning a plummeting reduction...

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 142,000 in August, and the unemployment rate changed little at 4.2 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in construction and health care. {snip} The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for June was revised down by 61,000, from +179,000 to +118,000, and the change for July was revised down by 25,000, from +114,000 to +89,000. With these revisions, employment in June and July combined is 86,000 lower than previously reported.

On Sunday, Venezuelans went to the polls to select a new president. By Sunday night the results were clear. Exit polls found that the Venezuelans voted two-to-one to end the communist dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro. The exit polls had communist tyrant Nicolas Maduro losing by a landslide. 66.6% for opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez and 30.86% for Nicolas Maduro. -- snip -- But on Monday, Maduro announced he was the clear winner. On Tuesday he called for the arrest of the two leading opposition figures. And by Thursday, the communist tyrant announce the construction of two maximum-security prisons where he will...

More than 10,000 hotel workers at 24 hotels stretching from Boston to the West Coast to Hawaii went on strike early Sunday morning, disrupting travel during a busy Labor Day weekend. The hotels are reportedly still open but guests will deal with a skeleton staff unable to provide full services. UNITE HERE, the union representing the striking workers, says they are striking not just for better pay but also better working conditions, including the return of automatic daily room cleaning that many hotels dropped during the pandemic. “We’re on strike because the hotel industry has gotten off track,” Gwen Mills,...

Bosses are quietly trying to reset worker pay levels, saying the era of overpaying for talent is over. Pay for many white-collar recruits shrank last year, and now wages for new hires in construction, manufacturing, food and other blue-collar sectors appear to be ebbing too, according to an analysis of millions of jobs posted on ZipRecruiter.com. Job seekers report seeing roles that once offered salaries between $175,000 and $200,000 a year ago now being advertised for tens of thousands of dollars less, a change that has had them rethinking their pay expectations. Companies are also moving job openings to lower-cost...

Fake job ads are proliferating online, with more companies admitting to posting realistic-looking job openings that don't actually exist. Forty-percent of companies said they have posted a fake job listing this year, according to a survey in May of 650 hiring managers from career site Resume Builder. Three in 10 companies currently have fake listings on their sites or on job boards, according to the survey.

In today’s rapidly evolving job market, many job seekers find themselves perplexed by the abundance of job openings paired with the difficulty of securing employment. Despite reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicating millions of job vacancies, the reality of landing a job has become increasingly challenging. This seeming contradiction has left many wondering, “If everyone is hiring, why can’t I get a job?” The answer lies in the complex dynamics of the modern hiring landscape, influenced by factors such as ghost jobs, automated screening processes, and economic uncertainty. The current job market presents a paradox. On one hand,...

Sir Keir Starmer has confirmed pensioners’ worst fears. There will be no U-turn on his decision to remove the winter fuel payment. He has said it is a choice he “has to make”, a decision he “didn’t want” to make. But this cannot be true. Be under no illusions, this is a cold, hard political calculation. Sir Keir is trying to dress up his political choices as “difficult decisions”, sheepishly blaming everyone but himself. He is trying to take the 10 million pensioners who will lose their annual payment for fools. Removing the winter fuel payment is something he cannot...

A group of Republican senators wants to know how President Biden’s Department of Labor severely overestimated the number of new jobs created over the past year — after the agency made its largest downward revision to US payroll figures since 2009. The revised figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), released last week, suggested that there were actually 818,000 fewer jobs during the 12 months ending in March than initially reported — an indication that the economy may be less robust than the White House is saying. That means that the actual job growth during that period was likely...

The progressive left relies on the narrative that economics is a sophisticated discipline, full of complex theories, only grasped by “experts” and politicians, because that’s how they pass off their flagrant lies and ignorance. Of course, there’s nothing really that complicated about supply and demand, freedom of choice instead of forced commerce, gross versus net, attacking the affordable energy resource making the global economy move, cronyism, subsidies, debt, printing money out of thin air, and cold hard data. Thankfully, we conservatives have Andrew Puzder (I routinely lament over the fact that he was never our Secretary of Labor), who along...

Fast-food restaurants survive by providing affordable, quick, and convenient meals, but cost inflation is now pushing their business models to the brink.It has become more expensive to eat out over the past five years, with food away from home increasing by 30 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In just the past year, the cost of eating at a fast-food restaurant has increased by more than that of a full-service restaurant.Within the consumer price index, the limited-service meals category (food that is ordered at a counter and taken to go) rose by 4.3 percent year over year in...

What Is Really Going on at Federal Agencies?Years ago as an intern in D.C., and long before the agencies all locked their doors to visitors, I had the occasion to putter around the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These were obviously not normal workplaces. To my amazement, they were mostly dark, empty, and quiet, and the employees did not seem in the slightest bit busy doing anything at all. It was all kind of spooky. It then occurred to me that these many hundreds of agencies and millions of employees are not really...

eachers are quitting in droves as a new generation of appallingly behaved students push their patience to the limit. Born between roughly 2010 and the end of 2024, Generation Alpha will make up the largest cohort of children ever to live on planet earth. However, the two billion-plus toddlers and pre-teens are already being cited for their illiteracy, unruly behavior and an uncontrollable addiction to screens. Many blame lockdowns and school closures during the pandemic for the rise in bad behavior, while some are pointing the finger at Millennial parents who are opting to distract children with technology rather than...

During an interview with ABC News on Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who appeared in her personal capacity, said that she was “not familiar with” the Bureau of Labor Statistics revising the number of jobs created down by over 800,000. Host Kayna Whitworth asked, [relevant exchange begins around 2:00] “I am curious as to your thoughts on today, the Bureau of Labor [Statistics] saying that more than 800,000 fewer jobs were actually created than initially reported. And I — we have a soundbite here…because Donald Trump is already addressing this on the campaign trail.”

US job growth during much of the past year was significantly weaker than initially estimated, according to new data released Wednesday. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ preliminary annual benchmark review of employment data suggests that there were 818,000 fewer jobs in March of this year than were initially reported