Free Republic

If you still have a good job, you might want to hold on to it very tightly because there are a whole bunch of signs that unemployment in the United States is about to start getting worse again. Over the past several weeks, a substantial number of large corporations have announced disappointing earnings for the third quarter. Many of those large corporations are also loaded up with huge amounts of debt. So what is the solution? Well, the favorite solution on Wall Street these days seems to be to lay off workers. In fact, it is almost turning into...

It's been a week of bad news in the gaming world, so lets get through this together. Zynga laid off 5% of their staff this week in an attempt to shore up their bottom line. They closed a Boston office, reduced staff in Austin and have proposed shutting down shops in the UK and Japan. They're sunsetting 13 games and cutting down investment in their title The Ville (a game that is the subject of legal action from EA who claims it copies EA's The Sims Social). I'm not a fan of Zynga's practice of cloning successful games but it's...

Bad news will greet Vice President Joe Biden when he arrives in Wisconsin Thursday night. Hours earlier, Oshkosh's largest employer announced that it will lay off 450 employees in January. Oshkosh Corp., a truck manufacturer with Pentagon contracts, blamed the "difficult decisions" on looming cuts to the nation's defense budget. "As Oshkosh and others in the defense industry have discussed on numerous occasions, domestic military vehicle production volumes will decline significantly in 2013 due to the reduction in U.S. defense budgets and the fact that military spending is returning to peacetime levels," the company said in a statement. "Unfortunately, these...

Several swing states saw their unemployment rate drop in September, the Labor Department reported Friday in the final state-by-state breakdown before the election. Ohio and Florida — two of the most contested battlegrounds in the race for the White House — were among the states to see employment gains. The new data comes just weeks after the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate had unexpectedly fallen to 7.8 percent in September, the lowest level of President Obama’s term. The economy added a total of 114,000 jobs last month. In all, seven states being contested by Obama and GOP nominee...

I missed this last week, but hey, who doesn't love being regaled with yet another example of the many ways in which the government's unceasing market interference continually goes awry? The federal government never seems to tire of fancying itself a venture capitalist with our tax dollars, no matter how many instances of hilarious ineptitude are thrown back in their face. (As ever, I only laugh to keep from weeping.)On Friday, Reuters reported that a foreign wind manufacturer with plants in the United States has decided to lay off upwards of 800 workers, due largely to uncertainty over the looming...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported last Friday that 114,000 new jobs were created last month, according to its Establishment Survey of business payrolls that has been emphasized by the Obama Administration. That is pitifully weak, especially for what is supposed to be the fourth year of a recovery (the National Bureau of Economic Research scored the recession as officially over in June, 2009). As economist John Lott noted at FoxNews.com on October 5, the working age population grew by 206,000 last month. With two-thirds of those working as would be expected during a normal recovery, 138,000 new jobs...

Now that the average price of gasoline in the United States is clocking in at all-time record levels for this time of year, especially in California, what effect will that factor have upon the official U.S. unemployment rate, which just clocked in at its lowest level since early 2009? Unfortunately, that's the wrong question to be asking today, because it takes roughly two years for a major change in the price of oil and gasoline to play out and fully impact the U.S. unemployment rate. The right question to ask today is: "what was the price of gasoline doing two...

Want to violate the law? Yes! Enjoy paying for advice from your attorney? NO! Then Follow the Administration's advice and just say Yes! It's no Big F***** Big deal and Somebody Else will pay. Maybe. A legal blog that I follow has summarized and commented on the Obama Administration's "legal" advice that there is no need to comply with the WARN Act requirement that companies with more than 100 employees to give written notice of a facility closing or mass layoff to the affected employees (and certain governmental offices) at least 60 days prior to the facility closing or layoff....

AFP - Fedex, the global delivery company, said Wednesday it was planning to cut "several thousand" people from its workforce via a voluntary departure program beginning early next year. Company chairman Fred Smith said at an investment conference in Memphis, Tennessee, that the cuts would come in the company's Fedex Express global express delivery service, and in the US unit, Fedex Services.

CEO emails 7,000 employees: Defeat Obama or else By Chris Isidore @CNNMoney October 9, 2012: 5:37 PM ET David Siegel, CEO of Westgate Resorts, warned employees that they may lose their jobs if President Obama wins re-election. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Surprise. David Siegel, the resort CEO who is building the biggest private home in the country, really, really doesn't like President Obama. And while Siegel hasn't sent any money to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, he has gone a step farther to support him. On Monday he sent an e-mail to all 7,000 employees of privately-held Westgate Resorts, many...

China Slowdown Leads To 1,500 Job Losses At US Engine Company — Stock Tanking Joe WeisenthalOct. 9, 2012, 5:24 PM This is exactly what you don't want to see. A major industrial company announcing a slowdown due to China and layoffs in the US. The company is Cummins Engine. The stock is off over 6% after hours, and the company is laying off up to 1500. We'll note that this story of declining global growth hitting domestic US manufacturers is a big one that we've been talking about for awhile. This explains why in recent months -- despite the secular...

The White House has initiated an effort, possibly extra-legal, to head off required layoff notices to employees of defense contractors on the cusp of Election Day. Worse, without congressional approval, it has offered to pay firms' penalties and court costs, potentially $500 million or more, out of the Pentagon budget. This puts defense contractors in an untenable position, creating additional economic uncertainty. They can break the law and keep the White House happy, or follow the law and annoy their major customer. If this were Venezuela, no one would think twice. But in America, if we're not shocked, something is...

Last week, I discovered one of the most corrupt acts I have seen while serving in public office: The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a memorandum, advising defense contractors that if they failed to comply with existing law, taxpayers would pay any resulting employee compensation costs and attorneys’ fees incurred. Instead of notifying defense contractors that they must abide by the laws set in place to protect American families, the administration has advised and encouraged these companies to break the law without penalty. Does that sound unbelievable to you? It sounded unbelievable to me when I first heard...

Unemployment in France touched 10.2% in April, a number last seen in 1999 according to data from Eurostat. click on chart for sharper image The question on newly-elected President Francois Hollande's mind is what to do about it. Economic Insanity  Hollande's layoff clampdown solution according to Labour Minister Michel Sapin is to "make layoffs so expensive for companies that it's not worth it." France's new Socialist government is planning to ramp up the cost of laying off workers for companies in the coming months, its labour minister said on Thursday after data showed the jobless rate hit the highest...

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Officials with the Los Angeles Unified School District on Wednesday warned of more layoffs and a shortened school year if voters reject the proposed tax increases on Election Day. KNX 1070′s John Brooks reports that while school staff is prohibited by law from arguing for or against ballot measures, that hasn’t stopped them from describing a so-called “doomsday” scenario for the district. In a carefully worded briefing to the school board’s Budget Committee on Tuesday, Chief Financial Officer Megan Reilly predicted major layoffs and program cuts without the much-needed cash infusion from Propositions 30 or 38....

MARIETTA — Lockheed Martin, which has about 8,000 employees in Marietta, announced Monday that it would not send out notices of possible layoffs to its employees right before Election Day. The move follows advisories from the Department of Defense and the federal Office of Management and Budget “indicating that DOD anticipates no contract actions on or about 2 January, 2013, and that any action to adjust funding levels on contracts as a result of sequestration would likely not occur for several months after 2 Jan,” a Lockheed spokeswoman in Bethesda, Md., said. The Budget Control Act of 2011 created a...

Corruption: Our lawless president tells defense contractors they can break the law requiring politically inconvenient layoff notices caused by sequestration defense cuts, and the taxpayers will pay their legal bills. When President Obama took the oath of office, he swore to uphold the Constitution and see that the laws of the United States were faithfully executed. He lied, and that lie was exposed in the administration's weekly document dump last Friday. It included a memo from the Department of Labor telling defense contractors not to obey the law and that, if they don't, U.S. taxpayers will foot their legal bills...

Sen. Graham: Obama move on defense layoff notices 'patently illegal'By Jeremy Herb - 10/01/12 02:45 PM ET Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) says that he will do anything he can to block the Obama administration from reimbursing defense contractors for severance costs if the firms don’t send layoff notices to employees. The Obama administration issued guidance Friday that said defense firms’ costs would be covered if they have to layoff workers due to canceled contracts under the across-the-board cuts set to take effect Jan. 2. The layoff notices have become a politically charged issue because they could have come just four...

In an effort to make the economy look a little rosier than it is, the Obama administration is basically coercing defense contractors so as to prevent news of layoffs hitting voters before the election. With sequestration about to result in some major cuts to the defense budget, contractors will lose government business -- and that means, employees will lose jobs. But to prevent poor numbers ahead of the November election, the Obama administration has made it very, well, fiscally unwise for companies to issue layoff notices too early. The Labor Department issued guidance in July saying it would be “inappropriate”...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The White House on Friday told government contractors worried about fiscal cliff spending cuts to hold off on warning employees about possible layoffs. The government said it would cover legal costs if contractors are forced to slash their payrolls because of the looming $109 billion in automatic cuts next year and are alleged to have violated the WARN Act. .... Defense contractors in particular have warned for months that the upcoming sequester would cost jobs in their industry. And Lockheed Martin's CEO has said publicly he may be forced to issue notice this fall of possible...