Free Republic

On Thursday’s broadcast of CNN’s “The Lead,” Ford President and CEO Jim Farley stated that he’s not opposed to giving workers pay increases, “But if it prevents us from investing in this transition to EVs and in future products like the ones we have now like a new F-150,” they won’t do that because they’ll go bankrupt. While discussing the pay raises demanded by the UAW in negotiations and pay raises for CEOs, Farley said that they have offered pay raises and are open to big pay increases, but the 40% that the UAW is asking for is too much...

Worker shortages, changing regulations, weakend supply chains and rising attention on working conditions and job quality have many businesses and workers reflecting this Labor Day on what lies ahead — and one time-tested model with bipartisan support could be a game-changer for workers and companies alike: Employee ownership. In every industry today, employee-owned companies — from grocery stores such as WinCo and Publix to Gore, the manufacturers of Gore-Tex, and Southwest Airlines — are demonstrating the promising potential to grow successful businesses while improving workers’ lives. This model can take different forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives, Employee Stock Ownership Plans...

President Biden informed Congress on Thursday of his intention to raise federal civilian workers’ pay by an average of 5.2 percent, taking a required step to advance the proposal outlined in his 2024 budget request earlier this year. In letters addressed to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Vice President Harris in her capacity as president of the Senate, Biden outlined his alternative pay plan for an across-the-board pay increase of 4.7 percent and locality pay increases averaging 0.5 percent, for an overall average increase of 5.2 percent.

Vice President Kamala Harris greeted supporters on Martha’s Vineyard Saturday on behalf of the Biden-Harris campaign. Her arrival at the idyllic, high-priced Massachusetts resort was touted as a "grassroots reception." However, access to the VP, on an island in which 75% of voters pulled a lever for the Democrat ticket in 2020, cost as much as $10,000. "I guarantee you not one working-class Democrat (was) invited to the Kamala event," long-time Martha’s Vineyard homeowner, high-profile attorney and longtime Democrat supporter Alan Dershowitz told Fox News Digital. The big-ticket appearance underscored growing concerns, according to many long-time island residents, on an...

As cost increases persist and workers try to keep up, buzzwords like “poverty wage,” “minimum wage” and “living wage” are coming back into the lexicon, shaping conversations about what it means to make enough and who decides where to draw the line. The federal minimum wage, which was last raised in 2009, stands at $7.25 an hour. A full-time employee, working an average of 40 hours per week on minimum wage, makes $15,000 annually (which puts these workers below the poverty line in many states). A recent study from SmartAsset found that the average American worker needs $68,499 in after-tax...

A group of California Democrats are expected to propose handing out unemployment benefits to striking workers. Language expected to be released in the coming days or weeks to provide striking workers with benefits from California's unemployment insurance program that is $18 billion in debt. The move comes amid historic strikes by both screenwriters and actors, forcing many movies and TV shows to halt production. "It would allow individuals on strike who are not looking for work and were not let go through no fault of their own to claim unemployment insurance as if they were truly unemployed," California Chamber of...

22 Aug 202321 Democrat Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s office is hoping to draw high-skilled workers and companies to the state and away from red states by marketing Michigan’s lax laws around abortion and LGBT+ issues as “freedom.” The Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), through a public-private partnership with the governor’s office, launched a digital ad campaign last week promoting LGBT+ lifestyles and abortion as “reproductive freedom,” The Huffington Post reported on Sunday. The advertisements are targeted to half-a-dozen mostly southern states where Republicans have passed laws protecting the unborn and laws protecting children from gender ideology and women and girls’...

Officials in California are facing fierce scrutiny over increasing crime as some federal employees are being told to work from home over fears surrounding public safety. Independent journalist Erica Sandberg described what she called utter "mayhem" in San Francisco during "Fox & Friends" as state workers were reportedly told to work remotely. "What we're seeing right now is a matter of just mayhem with not enough police officers on the beat... not empowering stores to do what they need to do in order to stop this," she told Ainsley Earhardt Tuesday. "You shouldn't let people into the store who are...

Federal workers have been authorized to leave work early as severe weather is expected to hit the Washington, D.C., area and parts of the Northeast region of the country. In a news release Monday, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) said federal employees located in the D.C. area were authorized to leave their workplaces two hours earlier than expected, and that all employees must evacuate their buildings “no later than 3:00 at which time Federal offices are closed.” Telework employees are also expected to receive weather and safety leave for the amount required for them to commute back home,...

Two 7-Eleven workers in California took matters into their own hands and used a stick to wallop a man who tried to steal a trash can full of cigarettes. Shocking video of the attempted robbery shows one employee holding the thief down on the ground while his colleague relentlessly whacks him roughly 25 times. “Okay, okay!” the thief screamed at this attacker while pleading for mercy. Before he was taken down by the retail workers, the robber had casually sauntered behind the California convenience store’s register with a 20-gallon trash can in tow. He nonchalantly grabs fistfuls of tobacco products...

Workers in the United States believe they will need to save around $1.8 million for retirement, as inflation continues to fuel anxieties over savings, according to a survey from Charles Schwab. This estimate is up from last year’s $1.7 million, with 37 percent of respondents stating they think it’s very likely they will reach this number, down 10 percentage points from last year, according to the survey. The survey of 401(k) participants found 62 percent of workers think of inflation as a challenge to saving for a “comfortable retirement,” up from last year’s 45 percent, while 42 percent said stock...

Kombucha has treated George Thomas Dave well. But Dave's kombucha factory treated workers terribly for years, according to a new ruling in a long-running lawsuit against his company, GT's Living Foods. SNIP As the owner of GT's — which sells about $275 million of the fermented tea drink and other beverages each year — Dave has become a billionaire, according to Forbes estimates. This year he bought a $14-million hilltop estate just a few streets away from the two-home compound he already owned in Beverly Hills. All along, he's insisted that good vibes and a positive attitude have been the...

Pro-natalist policies have a weak track record in every country where they've been tried. They're incredibly expensive, they produce few or no gains in fertility, and they can lead to a disturbingly authoritarian form of governance where individual choices about family formation are deprioritized. Meanwhile, birthrates have declined in tandem with several social upsides as well: better education, greater wealth, longer life spans, and more freedom for women. Across the world, efforts to address these issues have focused entirely on attempts to reverse the underlying trend. Countries from Russia to Japan to Italy have tried an array of measures—from pressure...

The war in Ukraine is so profitable for defense companies in the US and Europe that they're having trouble finding thousands of skilled workers to satisfy a record influx of orders, according to the Wall Street Journal.Ukrainian soldiers fire at Russian positions with a U.S.-supplied howitzer. Photo: LIBKOS/Associated PressPart of the issue is that jobs in the defense industry require niche skills and security clearances - a problem compounded by a flood of defense companies trying to hire at the same time in an industry which has long struggled to meet recruitment goals."Our first priority is really to ramp up...

McDonald's has laid off hundreds of workers and cut pay packages for others after shuttering officers across the US. The fast food firm slashed roles across all departments including marketing, operations, store staff and field offices, the Wall Street Journal reported. It comes as part of a huge restructuring at the burger giant, which is reportedly part of a bid to re-invent the drive thru across the world. McDonald's even temporarily shut down offices across the US on Monday as it started to tell some corporate workers about the layoffs. In recent months, the fast food giant recruited pop culture...

President Joe Biden on Monday boasted he has a “freezer full” of one of the most expensive ice cream brands in the White House — all while American workers continue to suffer under his soaring inflation. “My name is Joe Biden. I’m doctor Jill Biden’s husband, and I ate Jeni’s ice cream. Chocolate chip. I came down because I heard there was chocolate chip ice cream,” Biden told the audience during an event held at the White House. “By the way, I have a whole refrigerator full upstairs.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced Monday that the company will be laying off another 9,000 employees, marking the second round of significant layoffs this year. These cuts are in addition to the 18,000 layoffs Jassy announced in January, which had started in November. Jassy said in a memo to employees on Monday that most of the cuts will affect Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s People Experience and Technology Solutions, advertising, and Twitch, which is a video live-streaming service. “For several years leading up to this one, most of our businesses added a significant amount of headcount,” Jassy wrote in a memo...

Business owners and workers in a Democrat-run North Carolina tourist town said their downtown district is deteriorating amid rising crime, rampant homelessness and diminishing police. Multiple people who work in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, bemoaned the condition of the city and pinpointed a lack of police presence to its decline, according to an investigation by local outlet Asheville Watchdog. "We really need beat cops, police on bicycles," Rose Garfinkle, who lives and works downtown, told the outlet. "The lack of a police presence is noticeable. Things have taken a turn in the last five years." Violent crime has spiked in...

Telecom equipment maker Ericsson plans to lay off 8,500 of its employees globally to cut costs, according to a memo sent to employees from the company’s CEO Börje Ekholm. “The way headcount reductions will be managed will differ depending on local country practice,” Ekholm wrote. According to Reuters, the layoffs are predicted to affect North America and would be the largest to hit the telecom industry. The company announced Monday that about 1,400 jobs in Sweden will be slashed as well. “In several countries, the headcount reductions have already been communicated this week,” he said. Ericsson is the latest telecom...

The pandemic may be winding down, but the work-from-home revolution marches on. Nearly 30 percent of all work happened at home in January, six times the rate in 2019, according to WFH Research, a data-collection project. In Washington and other large urban centers, the share of remote work is closer to half. In the nation’s biggest cities, entire office buildings sit empty. The COVID-19 pandemic transformed the American workplace. The share of all work performed at home rose from 4.7 percent in January 2019 to 61 percent in May 2020. Some economists consider the remote-work boom the greatest change to...