Free Republic

Cook County board meetings are usually dry and filled with policy and procedure details. On Tuesday, that was not the case. There were tears and real emotion. CBS 2’s Roseanne Tellez introduces us to some of the people who got the most unwelcome news, days before Thanksgiving. Some county employees begged for their jobs. Cook County commissioners who supported a penny-an-ounce sweetened beverage tax say they warned of the cost of repealing it: a budget amendment filled with pain. “It has actual layoffs of human beings who have jobs and who have families,” Commissioner Larry Suffredin (13th District) said. Officials...

The ranks of top US diplomats are being depleted at a “dizzying” speed, the head of America’s diplomatic trade union has warned. Since January, the number of “two-star” minister counselors has dropped by 42% and “three-star” career ministers by 14%, according to Barbara Stephenson, president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) and former ambassador to Panama. At the highest ranks of the State Department, the number of career ambassadors has dropped from five to two, after the retirement of three top diplomats. “These numbers are hard to square with the stated agenda of making State and the Foreign Service...

Disney/ABC TV has begun making long-feared layoffs as part of a broader restructuring of its broadcast business, with rumors swirling that bigger moves—including a possible sale of ABC—are coming. Deadline first reported the staff reductions on Thursday, saying they could impact up to 200 employees across Disney and ABC properties. An ABC source with knowledge of the situation said that the cuts will hit upward of 40 of its employees on the East Coast and still more out west. Multiple people at ABC told Splinter that there is a widespread belief at the network that the belt-tightening could be tied...

Disney/ABC Television Group has begun laying off employees, part of a long-anticipated restructuring and reallocation of resources at the Walt Disney Company’s non-sports broadcast and cable television arm. A source tells Variety that the company began notifying affected employees Thursday morning. The volume of employees impacted is said to be significantly lower than the 10% workforce cut that had been speculated when news broke of the layoff plan six weeks ago. Cuts are impacting all the group’s entertainment units, including ABC Entertainment ABC Studios, Disney Channel, DisneyXD, Disney Junior, and Freeform — but impact is expected to be minimal on...

The retail landscape looks like it's about to get rougher for everyone — especially those on the lowest rung of the ladder. Retail is the largest employer in the US, employing an estimated 4.6 million people in full- or part-time jobs. But estimates also say that the sector has shed more than 89,000 jobs in general merchandise stores alone between last October and May of this year. At last count, over 6,375 stores have been announced for across the country this year. It's this shedding of jobs that's about to create what retail-industry consultant Doug Stephens is calling a "retail...

The employees of Glenn Beck’s Mercury Radio Arts and The Blaze, the privately-held companies that comprise his once thriving but now crumbling conservative media empire, suspected something bad was going to happen Thursday morning when they arrived for work at the suburban Dallas, Texas, production complex and noticed the extra compliment of security guards. By the time Beck himself spoke to his dwindling army of underlings as one of his personal bodyguards from Gavin de Becker’s celebrity protection service stood watch, nearly 60 of their coworkers had been abruptly fired—a body count that amounted to almost 30 percent of the...

Glenn Beck’s struggling media project the Blaze will be conducting mass layoffs in a bid to “keep pace with the massive changes” in the media industry. “Today, we said goodbye to just over 20 percent of the combined workforce of Mercury Radio Arts and the Blaze,” Beck said in a statement Thursday regarding his television and internet operation. “We are losing a lot of talented and committed colleagues, who are some of the best human beings I know  —  some have been friends of mine for 30 years.”

Glenn Beck‘s TheBlaze is saying farewell to 20 percent of its employees. And Beck may cry. “What happened?” he asked in a highly emotional piece that he posted to his website and to Medium that makes it sound like someone is literally ripping out his spleen. “My heart is heavy today.” “Today, we said goodbye to just over 20 percent of the combined workforce of Mercury Radio Arts and TheBlaze (with most of the changes happening at TheBlaze),” he wrote. “We are losing a lot of talented and committed colleagues, who are some of the best human beings I know — some...

They’re going to have to start laying some people off, and for much of Washington, DC, that’s a completely foreign concept. Agencies are “pretty certain” they will need to institute reductions in force as they aim to satisfy an executive order from President Trump and ensuing guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, said Leslie Pollack, deputy associate director of OPM’s HR Strategy and Evaluation Solutions, on WJLA’s “Government Matters” program. Those documents required executive branch agencies to reorganize themselves and, in the process, cut the size of their workforces. Pollack’s office, which provides human resources consulting to federal...

Economics: Last year, the "Fight for $15" movement was said to have unstoppable momentum, driven by labor unions, left-wing politicians and a sympathetic press. Then reality struck. Too bad it didn't strike sooner. "This is a trend that cannot be stopped." "The political earth has shifted." "This movement continues to build." "Even economic experts who oppose the increased rate see it gaining momentum." That's what all the "experts" were saying last year. It was easy to make such assumptions. Protests and strikes were on the rise, hitting 340 last year. In 2015 alone, 14 cities and states approved $15 minimum...

Boeing Co. is offering voluntary buyouts to some workers on the flight line at its 787 Dreamliner campus in North Charleston, but the aerospace giant says it's too early to say whether more layoffs are in the offing. Those affected by this latest round of cost-cutting include flight readiness technicians and flight readiness inspectors. The buyout offers represent the first time workers who were eligible to vote for union representation have been asked if they'd like to voluntarily leave the company. Those workers have until Aug. 4 to decide whether to take the buyout offers. "There is still time remaining...

Shares of Harley-Davidson (HOG) dropped 10% in the morning after the company reported second-quarter earnings and were down nearly 6% at the end of the day. Almost everything was bad. Retail sales by its dealers in the US fell 9.3% in Q2, compared to a year ago, to 49,668 motorcycles. They were “down more than we anticipated,” the company said. And with “soft sales across most markets,” sales by its dealers globally fell 6.7%. “Industry new motorcycle sales deterioration continued,” the company said in its presentation, lamenting “weak industry sales on soft used bike prices.” In addition to the industry...

The CEO of Apple-Metro Inc., a company that operates about 40 Applebee’s restaurants in the New York metropolitan area, said he’s been forced to cut at at least 1,000 servers in the past year as a result of New York’s recent minimum wage hike. “We have 1,000 less servers this time this year than we did this time last year,” Zane Tankel told Fox Business’ Stuart Varney on Monday. That amounts a two-thirds reduction of his total workforce, Tankel said. Tankel said the minimum wage increase has forced him to adopt a “concierge” type model of having servers help customers operate self-serve...

There are political movements to push the federal minimum hourly wage to $15. Raising the minimum wage has popular support among Americans. Their reasons include fighting poverty, preventing worker exploitation and providing a living wage. For the most part, the intentions behind the support for raising the minimum wage are decent. But when we evaluate public policy, the effect of the policy is far more important than intentions. So let's examine the effects of increases in minimum wages. The average wage for a cashier is around $10 an hour, about $21,000 a year. That's no great shakes, but it's an...

A new minimum wage study suggests Seattle's quest for a $15 minimum wage may not be completely painless. Not all is rosy in Seattle as the city gradually pushes to raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour, according to a new study that suggests hiring and the number of hours worked among lower-wage employees took a hit last year as minimum pay rose. The National Bureau of Economic Research unveiled a working paper on Monday that found the number of hours worked in low-skill professions dropped more than 9 percent in Seattle during the first three quarters of last...

A promise made before Christmas is fizzling before the Fourth of July. In December, then-President-elect Trump told hundreds of workers at the Carrier manufacturing plant that he had worked out a deal to save their jobs. But it's not working out that way. A steady downpour today did little to wash away the fact that the jobs of 600 union employees are going south. "They're going to Monterrey, Mexico," said Robert James, president of the local union. Reynolds said he felt betrayed, since Mr. Trump told workers during his December visit to the plant that 1,100 jobs would be saved....

Peddling fake news does not, in fact, equate to a long-term successful business strategy, reporters for The New York Times are learning the hard way. The Gray Lady, which many in the media class consider the pinnacle of the information business, is struggling so much financially that reporters are expected to be laid off from the publication, along with many editors, the New York Post reports. “Reporters at the New York Times could soon be ‘vulnerable’ to the ax,” the Post’s Keith Kelly wrote. “If the ongoing round of voluntary buyouts being offered to editing staff does not get enough...

Reporters at the New York Times could soon be “vulnerable” to the ax. If the ongoing round of voluntary buyouts being offered to editing staff does not get enough takers, the Gray Lady could begin another round, NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet recently warned his top department editors. “Up until now, the company had not indicated that layoffs would happen if targeted numbers weren’t achieved,” Grant Glickson, president of the NewsGuild, told Media Ink. As part of the NYT’s ongoing restructuring of its editing ranks, 109 copy editors have had their jobs eliminated. There are estimated to be about 50...

The Carrier plant in Indianapolis that President Trump convinced to stay open late last year will lay off more than 600 employees beginning next month, according to a new report Thursday. CNBC reported that the deal struck by Trump before he assumed office isn’t working out as expected, and more than 600 employees will soon face layoffs. Trump and Carrier reached an agreement in December to keep about 1,000 jobs at the Indiana plant. Both Carrier and Trump celebrated the agreement on Twitter Trump also celebrated the agreement at the plant shortly after it was reached as an early victory...

Nike has announced a new business structure, which among other changes involves trimming 2 percent of its workforce globally. "Nike's leadership and organizational changes will streamline and speed up strategic execution," the retailer said in a statement Thursday, explaining plans of how Nike will also change the reporting divisions of its company. "The changes are ... expected to result in an overall reduction of approximately 2 percent of the company's global workforce," Nike said. As part of the organizational changes, about 1,400 employees are expected to lose their jobs. Nike had 70,700 employees as of May 31, 2016. Shares of...