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According to reports, Biden has chosen Boston Mayor Marty Walsh as Secretary of Labor. Walsh, a former president of his city’s building and construction trades council, was considered a favorite “top of labor leaders” like AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka for the role. Walsh’s personal ties with Biden, who spoke at his 2017 city inaugural, also likely helped him clinch the secretary of labor role. Trumka, back in 2019, told Politico: “He’s a friend and knows Joe: They’ve worked together on numerous occasions. They have the relationship I think is necessary.” According to reports, in August of 2019, two high profile...

China has constructed a vast string of factories inside the walls of Xinjiang mass internment camps, and Chinese authorities are forcing thousands of Muslim minorities to work in cotton fields, according to two recent investigations. Why it matters: Xinjiang products are deeply integrated into lucrative supply chains around the world. The Chinese Communist Party's official embrace of coerced labor will force Western governments and institutions to choose between pleasing business leaders or enforcing universal human rights values. Details: In the past three years, the Chinese government has forced hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang to...

...the Department of Labor “does not anticipate” that there will be a lapse in unemployment benefits for claimants in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) programs, a spokesperson for the agency told CNBC.... ...Unemployment experts and other lawmakers had said that because President Donald Trump signed the legislation on Sunday as opposed to Saturday, people collecting PUA and PEUC benefits would miss a week of payments. But now the DOL says they can expect to receive....

Every Republican and Democratic senator has let Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) pass a bill through the Senate that will supercharge the outsourcing of the white-collar jobs needed by America’s professional class and its college-educated children. Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016 while promising to curb immigration and the huge H-1B program, said Kevin Lynn, founder of U.S. Tech Workers, a group that opposes the visa worker programs. He can veto the bill, or he can sign this bill when it is buried in the huge coronavirus bailout bill, Lynn said, adding, “If this is what Trump wants to be...

Recently, the Department of Labor (DOL) announced the creation of the “H-1B One Workforce” apprenticeship program designed to help more Americans enter industries frequently occupied by H-1B visa-holders. According to the agency’s press release, the program would fund “training for middle- to high-skilled H-1B occupations within key sectors in the U.S. economy, including information technology and cyber security, advanced manufacturing and transportation…” The $150 million-dollar program, we are told, is intended “to upskill the present workforce and train a new generation of workers to grow the future workforce…”Sounds good for U.S. workers, it would seem, especially given the present state...

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is hopeful to secure a Cabinet position within a potential Joe Biden administration, according to a new report. The report from Politico - a politics-specific news outlet - claims Sanders has an interest in becoming labor secretary if the Democratic nominee wins the upcoming general election. The senator did not confirm or deny the claims, which were first reported Thursday. "Right now I am focused on seeing that Biden is elected president," he told Politico. "That's what my main focus is." NBC5 News has submitted multiple requests to Sanders for comment. If Sanders were to leave...

<p>This news release presents statistics from two monthly surveys. The household survey measures labor force status, including unemployment, by demographic characteristics. The establishment survey measures nonfarm employment, hours, and earnings by industry. For more information about the concepts and statistical methodology used in these two surveys, see the Technical Note.</p>

The last few months have brought rioting, targeted violence toward police officers and conservatives, flag burning, and wanton destruction in U.S. cities. American society is also in turmoil. Ordinary Americans fear being “canceled” for saying the wrong thing or having the wrong ideas. Two New York Times editors have been ousted, and reporters all over the country feel increased pressure to conform to a specific narrative. A Chicago Federal Reserve economist was fired for politely criticizing the policy positions of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization. These are but a few examples. Some of America’s largest multinational corporations are not...

The Fezzan is an area of approximately 212,000 square miles of unforgiving desert and valleys. Situated in the south west of modern day Libya it’s not an area you’d easily traverse, let alone live in. Yet in the 1st millennium BCE a people did exactly that. They created art, irrigated the baked earth and sustained a culture. One of the earliest surviving references to the Garamantes is found in Herodotus’ Histories, written in the 5th century BCE[1]. Herodotus’ description was contradictory, they had no weapons, but they hunted a cave dwelling tribe nearby using chariots. He also went on to...

The monkeys are snatched from the wild and trained to pick up to 1,000 coconuts a day, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) said The animal rights group said pigtailed macaques in Thailand were treated like "coconut-picking machines". In a statement, Waitrose said: "As part of our animal welfare policy, we have committed to never knowingly sell any products sourced from monkey labour. Male monkeys are able to pick up to 1,000 coconuts a day, Peta says. It's thought that a human can pick about 80. It said it also discovered "monkey schools", where the animals were trained...

A report published Sunday by an Australian think tank revealed that as many as 83 internationally known brands – including Nike, BMW, Apple, Sony, Google, Lacoste, and Nintendo – have active ties to factories where evidence suggests the Communist Party has shipped Uyghur Muslims to engage in forced labor.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ May Employment Situation report shows that the United States economy added 2.5 million jobs last month, and the unemployment rate fell from 14.7 percent to 13.3 percent.Employment increased significantly in leisure and hospitality (1.2 million), construction (464,000), education and health services (424,000), retail trade (368,000), and manufacturing (225,000). These job gains surprised forecasters, given many States were only beginning to reopen their economies during the reports’ survey reference periods (the week/pay period that includes May 12). The median of all private sector forecasts predicted 7.5 million job losses in May and an unemployment rate of...

There’s a reason for that: The owner kept everyone who was willing to work on the payroll through the entire two-month shutdown. The second-generation chairman of Tennessee’s Holston Gases, Bill Baxter isn’t short on capital. He bought the bar just three years ago — four years after buying the well-known hotel and Silver Dollar Bar up the road. “They paid for us to get additional training so I got a certification for environmental awareness in response to FEMA online incident management,” Bennett Gocke, the man in charge of safety and security for patrons and staff, tells me. “And then on...

A majority of West Virginia’s Supreme Court has upheld the right to work law that has been argued in the court system for years after it first passed the state’s Republican majority Legislature. Justices reversed a Kanawha Circuit Judge’s earlier ruling that overturned key aspects of the law. The case was remanded back to the lower court, but only to enter summary judgment on behalf of the state. “Because we have found the Act does not infringe upon association, property, or liberty rights protected by the West Virginia Constitution, we reverse the February 27, 2019 order of the Circuit Court...

Robyn Ross received the call on a Friday. With COVID-19 patients threatening to overwhelm the nation’s hospitals, her OB-GYN would be transferring to virtual appointments. “For how long?” Ross asked. For the foreseeable future.Due to deliver April 24 at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, where Virginia’s first COVID-19 case was quarantined in early March, Ross’ plan for birth care is now riddled with uncertainty.Hospitals around the nation have employed quick-response crisis policies, with visitor restrictions in most major metropolises. The decision in major hospital systems across the nation, including New York-Presbyterian, Central Illinois, Central Texas, and all San Francisco hospitals,...

Another casualty in the quest to ‘save’ workers from ‘misclassification’ California’s AB 5 has taken another life: The new law has now killed off the 40-year old Lake Tahoe Music Festival. “After 40+ years of classical music concerts offered outside with family and friends, the Lake Tahoe Music Festival will call a wrap to our summer festival with two performances in August of 2020,” the official festival website says. The Festival also posted the announcement on their Facebook page. Assembly Bill 5 by former labor leader Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), has already significantly limited Californians’ ability to work as...

In the 1960s, Milton Friedman reportedly visited a construction site in a foreign country. To his surprise, the canal builders used no heavy machinery and instead armed thousands of men with shovels. He questioned the bureaucrat about this odd choice and the bureaucrat responded that it was a jobs program. “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal,” Friedman said. “If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.” Friedman’s absurd proposal illustrates the absurdity of make-work bias—the belief that conserving labor makes us poorer. Make-work bias was particularly popular during the Industrial...

Nancy Pelosi famously proclaimed that Democrats had to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it. On the other hand, Democrats in California last year passed legislation outlawing many freelance and independent contracting jobs knowing the disruption it would cause—and voters are now discovering the damage. Ride-hailing app Uber this week rolled out changes for drivers and riders in California in an effort to duck the state’s new labor law AB5. That law reclassified a large swath of independent contractors from freelance journalists to Uber drivers as employees who are owed rest breaks, workers compensation, health benefits and paid...

On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, (D-N.Y.), sat for a discussion with author Ta-Nehisi Coates. She dropped a number of shocking statements -- statements that elicited nothing but murmurs of agreement from Coates. AOC claimed: "No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars." How, pray tell, are American billionaires responsible for such massive theft? According to AOC, the very mechanisms of capitalism mandate such theft. In her view, successful businesspeople simply exploit their workers while maximizing their profits. Hypothetically speaking about billionaires making widgets, she said: "You didn't make those widgets! You sat on a couch while...

Finland has been at the forefront of flexible work schedules for years, starting with a 1996 law that gives most employees the right to adjust their hours up to three hours earlier or later than what their employer typically requires. The country’s newly installed political leader, Sanna Marin, just upped the ante, though, proposing to put the entire country on a four-day workweek consisting of six-hour workdays. Marin, the world’s youngest sitting prime minister and the leader of a five-party center-left coalition, said the policy would allow people to spend more time with their families and that this could be...