Free Republic

German Chancellor Angela Merkel used her weekly podcast on Saturday to sound the alarm on the country’s skilled labor shortage, saying it could force companies to move elsewhere. […] Germany wants to tackle the shortfall domestically by providing “good training for as many people as possible,” Merkel said. At the same time, Berlin is looking to recruit qualified people from other European Union countries, and further afield. There are already 2.5 million people from EU countries working in Germany. “But that alone is not enough, and that is why we also have to look for skilled workers from outside the...

In an interview on Sunday with Sky News, U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn stated that convicted terrorists should “not necessarily” serve out the entirety of their prison terms. His statement comes on the heels of Friday’s terror attack on London Bridge, in which two Brits were stabbed to death by a convicted terrorist who had been released early from prison.Corbyn’s softness towards terrorism should surprise no one, at least not those who have been paying attention to his unnervingly friendly attitude towards extremists over the past several decades (one Twitter user created a lengthy list). Corbyn is the...

Elizabeth Warren has a plan — to annoy union members who work for state and local governments. With her “Medicare for All” plan, the top-tier Democratic contender is revealing a tension in the neo-progressive movement. Warren’s $20.5 trillion over a decade to pay for Medicare for All requires what she calls a “redirection” in funds: $6 trillion in “existing state- and local-government insurance spending.” Of this figure, $3.3 trillion goes for Medicaid, public insurance for poorer people. But the other $2.7 trillion comes from the funds state and local governments “currently spend on employer contributions to private insurance premiums for...

Artificial intelligence could be used to make your next pizza, if you order one at T-Mobile Park. A Seattle startup called Picnic has developed a machine capable of turning out hundreds of pizzas an hour. The CEO of the company said the machine can also help solve a staffing shortage in the food services industry. “You can make different pizzas, each one in a row,” said Clayton Wood, CEO of Picnic. The machine gets the pizza order from an iPad app that was developed in-house, at the company’s office and lab in Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis on Wednesday signed an executive order establishing a new office that his administration says will research the state’s “rapidly changing economy and workforce.” The office, called the Office of Future of Work, will be part of the Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE), and will have to report annually to Polis with policy recommendations. ... Details on what the new office will cost taxpayers were not released. Sage Naumann, spokesman for Colorado Senate GOP, mocked the office on Twitter, saying it’s the third new office created this year. “The Democrats’ insistence on creating a new layer...

Three contractors are bidding to fix a broken fence at the White House. One is from Chicago, another is from Kentucky, and the third is from New Orleans. All three go with a White House official to examine the fence. The New Orleans contractor takes out a tape measure and does some measuring, then works some figures with a pencil. "Well," he says, "I figure the job will run about $9,000. That's $4,000 for materials, $4,000 for my crew and $1,000 profit for me." The Kentucky contractor also does some measuring and figuring, then says, "I can do this job...

According to Channel 13, 97.6% of the votes from Tuesday's elections have already been counted, Blue and White stands at 33 seats and Likud at 31 seats, with Blue and White leading by a narrow margin. It is important to note that these are still not the final results. Overnight, the committee was counting the near quarter of a million soldiers' votes cast by Israeli soldiers. The Central Election Committee (CEC) has been updating its website since the close of the polls at 10 p.m. on Tuesday. The last update was at 10:40 a.m. on Thursday: 4,354,991 votes had been...

Right-wing factions convened at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem Wednesday afternoon, deciding to establish a "right-wing bloc" headed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, that will work for the establishment of the next government. It was decided to form a joint coalition negotiations team for all factions in the bloc. In addition to Netanyahu, the meeting saw the participation of Minister Yariv Levin and faction heads: Yaakov Litzman, Moshe Gafni, Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked, and Bezalel Smotrich. Minister Aryeh Deri met with Prime Minister Netanyahu earlier this morning, as he was unable to attend the meeting due to the memorial ceremony...

Although Medicare for All remains a popular proposal for progressive Democrats, many labor unions remain divided over whether the single-payer healthcare proposal would benefit American workers. Former Vice President Joe Biden and other moderate 2020 Democrat presidential candidates have attempted to cast Medicare for All as harmful to the American worker, although some labor unions have backed the single-payer healthcare plan.

A federal labor complaint has been filed against Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign just days after the Vermont independent had reached an agreement with his campaign's unionized staffers. The complaint posted Monday on the National Labor Relations Board's website and noted by Bloomberg Law alleges several potential violations, including concerted activities (retaliation, discharge, discipline) discharge, illegal interrogation, repudiation and modification of contract. A full text of the labor complaint has not been released yet, and it was filed by an anonymous individual from Iowa. The NLRB allows individuals who are not on the campaign staff to file a labor law violations...

President Donald Trump has selected lawyer Eugene Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to be his new labor secretary. Trump tweeted news of the planned nomination on Thursday evening, less than a week after his previous secretary, Alexander Acosta, resigned amid renewed criticism of his handling of a 2008 secret plea deal with wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein. The financier was indicted this month on charges of sexually abusing underage girls and pleaded not guilty. "Gene has led a life of great success in the legal and labor field and is highly respected not only as...

ALBANY – Signaling the controversy surrounding the bill, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo chose a Manhattan office building – instead of a farm upstate or on Long Island – to sign a law Wednesday providing expansive new employment rights for farm workers. The bill has been hailed by unions and Democrats in the Legislature for giving farm workers certain rights that have been long provided to employees in other sectors of the economy. But critics say the measure ignores the realities of how farms operate in the different seasons and that more farms will be forced to close. The federal government...

While you were enjoying your Fourth of July weekend, I was attending a national conference on socialism. Why? Because socialism is having its moment on the left. Since there’s often confusion as to what socialism really is, I decided to attend the Socialism 2019 conference at the Hyatt Hotel in Chicago over the Fourth of July weekend. The conference, which had the tag line “No Borders, No Bosses, No Binaries,” contained a cross-section of the most pertinent hard-left thought in America. Among the sponsors were the Democratic Socialists of America and Jacobin, a quarterly socialist magazine. The walls of the...

RUSH: We have audio sound bites coming up — an amazing press conference, impromptu. The president on the White House lawn with more media people than I’ve ever seen at one of these things, and it just went on and on and on. And Trump was even more outrageous and on point than he usually is in this press conference. Acosta was standing right next to him for the entire thing. And the point here was to make it plane that Acosta had made the decision to resign, that Acosta was a great labor secretary, Trump really hates to see...

The leftist media machine has launched an effort to link Donald Trump with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This tiresome methodology of character attack is a threat to the core of free speech, as victimhood — whether of border children, women, blacks, gays, transgenders, or inquiring people — is transformed into a self-righteous weapon unhindered by policy prescriptions, employed by one political group against another on purely ideological grounds. [SNIP] But now a mob has been loosed. What is striking about Acosta's case is that he is being excoriated not for doing too much to defend a sex offender but too...

Rush is spreading false economic assertions again. Labor is NOT the biggest manufacturing cost. For example cars, even if union labor is used, the cost per vehicle is only 8% on average. I posting this to prove that we are selling out US workers for a few pennies on the dollar!!

Penny Pritzker, the billionaire heiress whose family owns the Hyatt hotel chain, took a ride on Air Force One this afternoon from San Francisco to Portland, Ore., where President Obama was making a series of fundraising stops. The ride came hours after the announcement of a global boycott of Hyatt Hotels by Unite Here, the nation’s largest hospitality workers union. That boycott has been joined by the National Organization for Women, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the National Black Justice Center, and the National Football League Players Association. Pritzker was the national finance chair of Obama’s 2008 campaign....

Federal regulators need to explain why they’ve granted a perpetually-floundering California credit union that serves organized labor permission to raise money from investors—especially considering those regulators haven’t given the same green light to a strong and growing credit union that serves rural Idahoans. Credit unions are member-owned nonprofits and generally can use only retained earnings for expansion plans. If a credit union wants to grow using secondary capital from investors, it must first seek permission from the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), which is supposed to evaluate the credit union’s stability and financial position before giving the green light. A...

Australia’s re-elected Prime Minister Scott Morrison once brandished a lump of coal in parliament, crying, “This is coal — don’t be afraid!” His surprise win in what some dubbed the “climate election” may have stunned the country, but voters should know what comes next in energy policy — big coal. Battered by extended droughts, damaging floods, and more bush fires, Australian voters had been expected to hand a mandate to the Labor Party to pursue its ambitious targets for renewable energy and carbon emissions cuts. Instead, Saturday’s election left them on course to re-elect the Liberal-led center-right coalition headed by...

Melbourne, Australia - Australia, one of the world's oldest continuing democracies, goes to the polls on Saturday to choose the country's next parliament and prime minister. Australians have had six changes of prime minister over the past 12 years - mostly the result of internal party fights - and the incumbent Liberal Coalition of Prime Minister Scott Morrison is hoping tax cuts and the enduring resilience of Australia's economy will be enough to keep it in office. But growth is slowing and climate change has emerged as a major issue after the country's hottest summer on record. The opposition Labor...