Free Republic

Last week, CNN featured a story called "Men are dropping out of the workforce. Here's why" The article went on to tell us virtually nothing at all about why so many men are leaving the workforce. Although as many as seven million men have stayed out of the workforce for varying reasons, the CNN piece was really about how more women are joining the workforce, and how wonderful it is that more women are working in "male dominated" fields. The fact that more women are joining the workforce, however, tells us nothing about why men are leaving. Indeed, the CNN...

Last week, the employment news was all about how payrolls increased by 269,000 jobs and blew past expectations. Yet, when we looked at the actual number of employed persons, it turned out that the number of employed people has gone down in recent months. At 158.4 million, total employment is still nearly 400,000 workers below where it was before the Covid Panic of 2020. Those who support the everything-is-great narrative have responded to the unimpressive employed-workers numbers by dismissing them as a result of workers retiring and other demographic changes. These explanations, however, require that we ignore the fact that...

The number of workers in the U.S. has continued to shrink as businesses struggle to find employees for their openings. "The hope for many to achieve a soft landing is that you meet in the middle, with demand cooling off and labor supply picking up, and we reach a much healthier equilibrium between the two," Michael Pugliese, an economist at Wells Fargo, told the Wall Street Journal Sunday. "But if labor supply flatlines or keeps falling, you need to bring demand down even more in order to cool off wage growth." According to Labor Department data, the number of workers...

The federal government needs to be more proactive in alleviating healthcare workforce shortages, Rick Pollack, president and CEO of the American Hospital Association, wrote in a Jan. 27 letter on the organization's website. In the letter, Mr. Pollack wrote the dire workforce shortages the healthcare industry is facing are projected to get worse. He wrote that by the end of 2022, the industry is set to lose 500,000 nurses, mostly through retirement. In addition, because of shortages in teaching staff and difficulties with classroom space, nursing schools had to turn away more than 80,000 qualified applicants in 2019. He suggested...

A very interesting interview with Chris Spear, president and CEO of the American Trucking Association.During a House Transportation Committee hearing on supply chain issues, CEO Chris Spear shares an internal survey showing that 37% of truck drivers “not only said no, but said hell no” to the Biden vaccine mandates.To give some perspective of the downstream consequence, the ATA President noted that “if just 3.7 percent, not 37 percent, just 3.7 percent” of the drivers left the industry, there would be over a quarter million vacancies resulting in a “catastrophic” collapse of the U.S. supply chain. Mr. Spear also shared...

China’s labor market is undergoing structural changes, with a shrinking labor force and rising labor costs. Young people are reluctant to enter factories, and the international labor market is shifting to Southeast Asia and other places. Some analysts expressed concerns that China’s status as the “world’s factory” may end within a year. According to the seventh national census released by Chinese authorities, China’s prime workforce population is decreasing. People aged 15 to 59, accounting for 63 percent of the total population, decreased by 7 percentage points from a decade ago. While another 18 percent of the total population, people aged...

America doesn't have a jobs problem. It has a pathways-to-jobs problem. Our economy is producing jobs -- there were 7.4 million open jobs as of February in the midst of a pandemic -- but our education system isn't preparing people to fill those jobs. What's worse, our workforce policies do a poor job of retraining people for the workforce of tomorrow. According to a study by PwC, roughly three out of four working Americans are ready to learn new skills to stay employable, but government-sponsored job training programs have a mixed-to-poor track record.

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:Section 1.  Continuing the President’s National Council for the American Worker.  To continue the President’s National Council for the American Worker established by Executive Order 13845 of July 19, 2018, as amended, that Executive Order is further amended by revising section 10 to read as follows:  “Termination of Council.  The Council shall terminate on September 30, 2021, unless extended by the President.”.Sec. 2.  Continuing the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board. The American Workforce Policy...

Facebook (FB) could have half its workforce permanently working from home in the next decade, Mark Zuckerberg announced this week. The tech giant’s boss released a public video on Thursday outlining the company's remote working policy for its 45,000 staff. Zuckerberg said about 50% of employees could be working remotely for good in the next five to 10 years. But he warned this could mean some workers receive lower salaries related to their cost of living. Facebook will start “aggressively” opening up hiring for remote workers, Zuckerberg said and establishing new hubs away from Silicon Valley. “Certainly being able to...

A proposal from Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer to increase the federal minimum wage to $22 per hour would body-slam the economy, according to a former CEO of one of America's major corporations. Earlier this month, Steyer proposed increasing the federal minimum wage, which is currently $7.25 per hour, to $22 per hour, according to Fox Business. Other major Democratic presidential candidates have lined up behind a $15 minimum wage, according to The Washington Post.

Need more proof that Amazon is big? It came this week. Amazon's U.S. workforce topped 500,000 for the first time, up 43% from the year before and more than triple what it was five years ago, the company said Friday. It gained 150,000 workers last year, more than the size of Apple's entire workforce. When it reported its quarterly performance Thursday, Amazon revealed that another 150 million people had become members of its Prime service, which offers faster shipping and other perks. On Friday, even while the Dow tumbled 600 points, Amazon shares soared passed $2,000 apiece, doubling in price...

WASHINGTON—Investigators with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement opened about four times the number of workplace investigations in the year ended Sept. 30 compared with the close of the Obama administration, while starting fewer probes into gangs, weapons and financial crimes, according to new figures the agency provided to The Wall Street Journal. ICE’s focus on workplace enforcement—targeting both immigrants working illegally and their employers—has intensified in the past two years. Homeland Security Investigations, the ICE arm that carries out criminal investigations, opened 6,812 new workplace cases in the 2019 fiscal year, up from 1,701 during fiscal 2016. The agency made...

Utah GOP Sen. Mike Lee is expected to try again on Thursday to pass his S.386 bill, which helps India’s graduates grab hundreds of thousands of college level jobs from American graduates. All GOP Senators are expected to stay silent while Lee pushes his bill that rewards roughly 300,000 of India’s contract workers in the United States with a fast track to citizenship. Silicon Valley investors back his bill, which also allows companies to annually pay 60,000 of India’s contract workers — plus 60,000 family members — with government-provided green cards after they take jobs from American graduates. Existing “country...

Young people are spearheading mental health awareness at the workplace. About half of millennials and 75 percent of Gen Zers have quit their jobs for mental health reasons, according to a new study conducted by Mind Shares Partners, SAP and Quatrics. It was published in Harvard Business Review.

Coworking startup WeWork plans to lay off up to a quarter of its workforce following the ouster of CEO Adam Neumann, according to a new report. WeWork plans layoffs 'in the thousands', though less than the 3,000 to 5,000 number that had been previously reported, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider. The company has 12,500 employees, so a cut of 1,000 to 3,000 people would be about 10% to 25% of its staff. Following backlash from investors over a dubious business model, Neumann stepped down last month, and new CEOs Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham put plans...

Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) now supports Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) green card giveaway bill, which will allow investors to reward many more Indian graduates for taking middle-class jobs from American college graduates. Perdue’s decision to end his opposition to the bill clears the way for Lee to rush his bill through the Senate on Thursday. If no other senators object, Lee’s bill will move through the Senate, putting it much closer to becoming law.

Fox Business host Lou Dobbs has gone after Utah Sen. Mike Lee for supporting a bill that would lift per-country gaps on permanent residency. The bill was ultimately blocked in the Senate. Dobbs described the bill as an “absolute dream” for outsourcers on “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” The bill's called the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act. “It would remove green card limits on workers from other countries,” said Dobbs, “but what that means is big countries like India and China principally would overwhelm the H1B visa list, and guess what? They would be taking American jobs at lower pay, historically...

Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee will try again to pass his S.386 bill, which grants green cards to India’s college graduates if they take jobs from American graduates. “I believe it’s ready for prime time,” Mike Lee said in a June 19 statement on the Senate floor, adding: It is ready to become law … I intend to be back next week making yet another attempt to pass this bill into law. And I hope and expect that we will be able to do so. Leon Fresco, a Democrat lawyer working with Lee to pass the bill, also declared the...

On Tuesday, former Vice President Joe Biden said his childcare tax credit would put "720 million" women into the workforce. The problem? There were only 327.1 million people in America in 2018, according to the Census Bureau. The bureau's "population clock" estimated the current population at 329.7 million as of Tuesday evening. "If you get a tax break for a racehorse, why in god’s name couldn’t we provide an $8,000 tax credit for everybody who has childcare costs? It would put 720 million women back in the workforce," Biden said at a "Workers 2020" summit put on by the Philadelphia...

Amazon-owned Whole Foods will be withdrawing medical benefits for hundreds of its part-time workers starting Jan. 1, 2020, the company said Thursday. In the past, employees needed to work at least 20 hours a week to buy into the health-care plan. Now they will need to work at least 30 hours. Less than 2% of its workforce, or 1,900 employees, will no longer be eligible for medical coverage, under the new policy, the company said.