Free Republic

American workers' wages are once again failing to keep up with inflation — a painful financial déjà vu of the pandemic years. The repeat situation may feel even more acute given that many workers are still catching up from the 2021-2022 inflationary bout, when companies gave workers only moderate pay raises that fell short of four-decade-high price increases, according to new economic research. From February 2021 to June 2022, real wages — or the purchasing power of the average American's paycheck — fell by more than 4%, according to the paper from the University of Chicago and ADP researchers. That...

The U.S. unemployment rate remains historically low, but a growing number of labor researchers are focused on a different warning sign: young men are becoming less likely to work or actively look for jobs. The unemployment rate fell to 4.1% in July, while the civilian labor force declined by 264,000 people and the labor force participation rate slipped to 61.4%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The decline is especially pronounced among young men. A May analysis by the American Institute for Boys and Men found that labor force participation among men ages 16 to 24 fell from 69%...

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis visited the Port of Pensacola on Wednesday to award $9 million from the Florida Job Growth Grant Fund to the City of Pensacola, supporting the establishment of Birdon America Inc.’s Southeastern headquarters and creating 2,000 new jobs. The grant funding will aid in public infrastructure enhancements and capacity building to support the construction of two shipbuilding facilities totaling approximately 400,000 square feet of manufacturing space at the Port of Pensacola. The new facilities will expand Florida’s maritime manufacturing capacity, allowing the port to produce complex Navy ship modules for submarines and surface vessels up to 400...

The American workforce is shrinking, and the decline is becoming difficult to dismiss as just another monthly fluctuation in the jobs data.More than 1 million people have disappeared from the U.S. labor force over the past year, while the share of Americans working or actively looking for work has fallen to its lowest level since the aftermath of the pandemic.The decline is being driven by several forces hitting at once: millions of baby boomers reaching retirement age, fewer younger workers coming behind them, tighter immigration, and a difficult hiring market that may be convincing some frustrated job seekers to simply...

The AI job apocalypse is turning out to be a bust. The Wall Street Journal reports that major companies are hiring again, defying predictions that artificial intelligence would wipe out large numbers of jobs — and specifically entry level jobs. But the really interesting twist in this story is that AI is actually creating jobs. Entry level workers aren’t victims; they are valuable assets.Instead of preparing for disaster, let’s focus on a more productive — and realistic endeavor — preparing students and young adults for the opportunities that AI is creating for them in work and in life.As the founder...

The job market has been a tough sell for many Gen Z graduates, with tariffs, economic uncertainty, and artificial intelligence reshaping hiring plans across corporate America. But according to Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, the next wave of six-figure opportunities won't be found in a Wall Street cubicle or Silicon Valley Slack channel. Instead, high-paying careers will partially come by picking up a wrench—literally.As tech giants race to build sprawling data centers—totaling $7 trillion in global capital outlays by the end of the decade—Huang believes the world is on the cusp of what he calls the "largest infrastructure build-out in human...

WASHINGTON – President Trump on Thursday unveiled a plan to give military veterans a priority on trucking jobs, cutting out illegal immigrants who “cannot read” road signs. “We’re going to make it as easy as possible for the veterans,” Trump said at an event at the White House. Flanked by two massive truck cabs, one a military green and the other blue with a large American eagle painted on it, the president praised veterans for having “a talent” for truck driving while blasting states that gave commercial driving licenses to illegal immigrants. “Radical left maniacs at the state level have...

PARIS — Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz are trying to jump-start the Franco-German engine one final time. After joint ministerial meetings in Germany last week, the leaders of the European Union’s two biggest economies have tasked their governments with striking a grand bargain that they say would strengthen Europe’s industrial defenses and revive the bloc’s automotive industry — key priorities for the two countries. The pact would fuse France’s push to reserve more public procurement contracts and subsidies for European industry with Germany’s drive to rescue its ailing carmakers, whose crisis has reached an acute stage after Volkswagen warned recently...

Each year, millions more graduates are thrust into China’s already saturated jobs market. The situation for this year’s cohort, flooding into an increasingly crowded pool of applicants fighting for an insufficient number of positions, is arguably the bleakest yet. The competition is intense, especially for jobs that offer weekends off and proper social insurance With more than 10 million Chinese students graduating each year since 2022, a figure that is only growing, it is the scale of the situation that is an exacerbating factor, with authorities tasked with finding meaningful work for the equivalent of a medium-sized European nation each...

Narrative violation. WSJ today.

A new agriculture bill just dropped in the House of Representatives. It features: Granting amnesty to illegal aliens present in the United States as of May 31, 2026, who meet minimal agricultural work history requirements. How many illegal aliens will claim to be agriculture workers?

Every time a disruptive technology arrives, the prediction is exactly the same: mass unemployment. ATMs were supposed to eliminate bank tellers. Spreadsheets were supposed to wipe out accountants. History tells a completely different, and terrifyingly counterintuitive, story. Out of every job title tracked by the U.S. Census over the past 60 years, exactly one has been fully eliminated by automation. In this episode, we break down the history of automation, from the birth of the ATM to the strange paradox of the airline pilot, to find out what it tells us about our future with AI. Are tools like Claude...

Ninety-five per cent of Americans believe the US is suffering an affordability crisis, as many report trouble with the rising cost of groceries and gas, according to a survey, conducted by Harris Poll. Despite stable employment and record-high stock markets, more Americans believe the overall economy is getting worse (57%) than in February (46%), when the poll was last conducted and before the war in the Middle East sent gas prices soaring. Fewer people today also believe the economy is getting better (16%, compared with 28% in February) and more say their financial security has gotten worse. Even rural Americans,...

(The Center Square) - The U.S. Department of War awarded a $10 million contract on Thursday as part of its Build Freedom project, an effort to develop workers for the skilled trades. The War Department gave the check to Mike Rowe, an American television host of “Dirty Jobs,” to support the mikeroweWORKS Foundation Scholarship program. The program funds scholarships for veterans to train for skilled trades jobs including plumbers, electricians and welders. Rowe coordinates the program through BuildFreedom.US, a website that compiles open job opportunities in the skilled trades sector. The website connects veterans with scholarships and educational materials to...

Aforce of 10,000 inspectors is being recruited to weed out foreigners: door-to-door across the nation, they will check mines, factories and shops, rounding up those without papers for deportation. Oh, and the target will be black people! Trump madness? Marine le Pen? No, this is South Africa and a project launched by President Cyril Ramaphosa to expel millions of black migrants from across the rest of Africa who have jumped the border or overstayed their visa. It’s Africa’s answer to ICE, though you won’t find many people protesting: quite the opposite. Government and the police are desperate to demonstrate they’re...

Wages and salaries for U.S. workers make up the smallest share of economic output in history, according to records going back to 1947. The U.S. as a whole gets more prosperous every year—but less and less of that prosperity is showing up in workers' paychecks. That's according to fresh analysis by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In a blog post on Wednesday, the researchers highlighted the declining share of the nation's economic output going to workers in the form of wages and salaries, as opposed to corporate profits and capital. Why have workers taken home a...

Jack Clark discusses Anthropic's regulatory fights, the possibility of recursive self-improvement, and how AI could reshape the economy.Today's guest is He's the co-founder of the artificial intelligence company behind Claudeand the head of its newly launched , a forum designed to think through the philosophical, political, and practical challenges that AI poses to society. Nick Gillespie talks with Clark, a former tech journalist at and , about his company's with the Trump administration; whether Anthropic should have held back Mythos, its superpowerful version, from general release; and what might happen if and when AI becomes fully capable of "," or...

When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that employees would be required to return to the office five days a week, he argued that in-person work would strengthen culture, collaboration, and innovation. Similar explanations have accompanied countless workplace decisions in recent years. Job cuts, pay freezes, and restructurings have routinely been packaged as opportunities for companies to become more agile, resilient, or future-ready. Whether these explanations are sincere or strategic, often bear only a passing resemblance to reality. The obvious question is: who even falls for statements that seem absurdly false or self-serving? According to new research out of Cornell University,...

With a smartphone strapped to her head, Indian housewife Nagireddy Sriramyachandra films herself slicing mangoes to train artificial intelligence-powered robots to take on household tasks in the future.

This college commencement season — from north to south, east to west, state universities to the Ivy League, law schools to military academies — one trend stood out: speeches about AI. Some speakers praised the technology and were booed; others denigrated it and were cheered. But one thing was clear, it’s all anyone can talk about. At least 25 graduating classes have heard some version of the spiel. Yes, talk about AI is timely, but it’s also not all that helpful. Nobody knows where the technology is headed, and students probably have a better grasp of that future than the...