Free Republic

With the federal deficit quickly approaching $4 trillion, the Trump administration and lawmakers must find ways to get costs under control – and quickly. One of the best tools for accomplishing this end is contracting out services to private providers, who can fulfill essential governmental services at a fraction of ordinary costs. While federal contracting has expanded significantly over the past few decades, flimsy lawsuits promulgated by the Department of Labor (DoL) threaten to unravel these hard-won cost savings. These lawsuits allege discrimination, undoubtably a pressing problem in America today. But the DoL’s actions sabotage the struggle for genuine equality...

Jobless claims continue to surge as more than 6.6 million Americans filed new unemployment benefits last week, according to new data released from the U.S. Department of Labor on Thursday.That brings the three-week total of new unemployment claims to 16.8 million as the economic fallout over the Wuhan coronavirus continues to take its toll on the nation’s economy. About 6.6 million Americans had filed new claims the week before and 3.3 million new claims were filed in the week ending on March 28. The previous record for number of new filings in a single week was in 1982 when 695,000...

Three years into the Trump administration, we see a clear pattern forming. The Obama administration implemented labor rules that make the labor market less flexible, often at the expense of smaller businesses, but in ways that made unions happy. The Trump administration then takes these rules away. The latest example is the dismantling of the Obama Labor Department's joint employer rule. As the new Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia and the Office of Management Director Mick Mulvaney explained recently in The Wall Street Journal, "When joint employment exists, two separate companies are responsible for ensuring that workers receive the federally...

Article One, Section 9, clause 2 of the United States Constitution states, “the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” It says something about the importance of that clause that, to this day, the right of habeas corpus has been suspended only twice in criminal cases: once in the case of Abraham Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War (rebellion), and once in the case of detaining suspected terrorists during the Bush administration (which, at least in theory, was tied to preventing something like...

A couple of years ago, I was interviewing a former senior White House official when the name Jeffrey Epstein came up. Unaware of my personal history with Epstein, this person assured me that the New York financier was no serious harm to anyone. He was a good guy. A charming guy. Useful, too. He knew a lot of rich Arabs, including the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, and, further, he had clever ideas about creating bond issues for them. “OK, so he has a girl problem,” this person threw on, almost as an afterthought. Epstein’s name, I was told, had...

Democratic Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Cory Booker both argued during Sunday interviews that former President Barack Obama deserves the credit for a good economy under President Donald Trump. The U.S. Labor Department announced Wednesday that the unemployment rate had hit 3.6%, the lowest rate since 1969. The report did note that 490,000 people left the workforce, but the gain was due in part to an increase in hiring in professional and business services, along with construction and healthcare jobs. (RELATED: Jessie Jane: GDP Growth Shows The Trump Economy Is A Serious Problem For Democrats) Despite those gains, the pair decided...

The Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Labor (DOL) announced an agreement Tuesday to work together in cracking down on companies that "discriminate" against U.S. workers by hiring foreign workers. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and the Labor Department will start sharing information on employers, refer issues to the appropriate officials at each department and offer training to each other’s staff under the agreement. Acting Assistant General John Gore said in a statement that the agreement will help the civil rights division’s “ability to identify employers the favor temporary visa holders over U.S. workers who can do the job.” “Employers should...

Job openings in the U.S. surged to a record 6.3 million, according to the most recent count from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of new positions surged by 645,000 as of the end of January, a new high for the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The metric gets close attention from Federal Reserve policymakers when gauging the economy and the appropriate monetary policy response. The report suggests slack remains in the labor market, as employers continue to hire and the pool of available jobs grows. Most of the openings came in the private sector, which saw 608,000...

US employers went on a hiring binge last month, adding 313,000 jobs, the most since July 2016, and drawing hundreds of thousands of people into the job market. The Labor Department says wage gains, meanwhile, fell from the previous month to 2.6 percent year-over-year growth. Strong hourly wage growth had spooked markets in February because it raised the specter of inflation. But January's figure was revised one-tenth of a point lower to 2.8 percent. The influx of new workers kept the unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1 percent.

A year before leaving office, President Barack Obama announced new steps to narrow what was described as a gender pay gap. Obama directed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), in partnership with the Department of Labor, to annually collect pay data by gender, race and ethnicity from businesses with 100 or more employees. On Wednesday, the Trump administration put that Obama-era order on hold. In a memo to the EEOC, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said it is launching a review of the effectiveness of the equal pay data collection initiative. (Companies are still required to...

Americans age 40 and older have a new reason to fear age discrimination: the United States Department of Labor. The Work Opportunity Tax Credit is at the root of the problem. This program is administered by the Labor Department and gives businesses tax breaks for hiring people from certain target groups.1 Among those groups are people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food stamps.2 At first glance, that would seem to make sense. Helping the poor is the right thing to do. However, the Labor Department states on its website that SNAP recipients range in age...

President Trump’s choice to head the Labor Department, Andrew Puzder, is expected to withdraw his name from consideration, several media reported Wednesday. NBC News and Fox Business News reported that Puzder was likely to withdraw, after CNN reported earlier Wednesday that senior Senate Republicans had asked the White House to remove his nomination because not enough of the party’s senators planned to vote for his confirmation.

Requiring employees in the United States to speak a foreign language is not discriminatory but forcing them to speak English violates federal law under a sweeping order issued by the Obama administration to crack down on “national origin discrimination” in the workplace. The government’s new enforcement guidelines state that bilingual requirements don’t meet discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act but English-only rules do because they’re restrictive language policies. The administration asserts that the new rules, which cover a broad range of scenarios that could get employers in trouble, were created because the American workforce is “increasingly...

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) is suing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) over its so-called union walk around rule. The lawsuit, which the Pacific Legal Foundation filed on behalf of the small business advocacy group, charges that OSHA’s rule illegally foists union activists onto non-unionized businesses. Attorneys with the legal foundation say OSHA has for decades allowed an employee representative to accompany an OSHA investigator on a workplace inspection, so long as the representative is in fact an employee. But in 2013, the agency issued a memo that said an employee representative could be someone who...

The Obama administration late Tuesday unveiled a final rule extending overtime pay to millions of workers. The regulation makes anyone earning up to $47,476 a year, or roughly $913 a week, eligible for overtime pay. The rule is one of the most significant regulatory initiatives of President Obama’s second term, and has drawn fierce opposition from industry groups. With the Republican Congress standing firm against a minimum wage increase and other economic proposals from Democrats, the president has exerted the power of the executive branch to try and burnish his legacy. In a concession to business groups, the administration reduced...

A new government regulation could end up causing serious damage to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. The Labor Department is finalizing a new fiduciary rule which the government claims will save the middle class billions of dollars by requiring the the firm and adviser to provide advice “in the client’s best interest.” Via the Labor Department’s website: *Commits the firm and adviser to providing advice in the client’s best interest. Committing to a best interest standard requires the adviser and the company to act with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence that a prudent person would...

WASHINGTON – The last minutes of Jose Santos Amaya Guardado’s young life were hell. The 17-year-old was lured into the woods by three of his classmates at the federally funded Homestead Job Corps in Florida. Outside the live-in vocational school, the students pulled out a machete, police say, and began to hack away at him. As he lay in a pool of his own blood, the attackers threw him in a shallow grave and set him on fire, authorities say. Accused ringleader Kaheem Arbelo, 20, allegedly marked the moment by having sex in the woods with student Desiray Strickland, 18....

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez is moving ahead with issuing a final regulatory proposal for financial advisers despite growing concerns from moderate Democrats and Republicans that it would hurt low-income Americans. Perez responded to Rep. Ann Wagner (R-Mo.) in a letter earlier this week after she and other lawmakers called on Department of Labor (DOL) officials and the administration to re-propose the controversial so-called "fiduciary standards," which would increase disclosure requirements for financial advisers. The business community is vehemently lobbying against the proposal, which failed in 2010, arguing it would raise consumer costs for Americans who need financial advice the most....

A veteran senator who let his mistress drown in a car he recklessly drove into a pond, rented a brothel for an entire night in Chile and sought meetings with communists is being honored by the Obama administration this month. Ted Kennedy received his posthumous accolades from the Department of Labor (DOL) with an induction into the agency’s “Hall of Honor.” The recognition is meant to showcase the life-changing contributions that a unique group of people have made on the American way of work, according to the agency. A special panel comprised of the Solicitor of Labor, the Assistant Secretary...

Perhaps the decisive factors in combating poverty and enabling upward mobility were not economic but cultural — the habits, mores and dispositions that equip individuals to take advantage of opportunities. This was dismaying because governments know how to alter incentives and remove barriers but not how to manipulate culture. The assumption that the condition of the poor must improve as macroeconomic conditions improve was to be refuted by a deepened understanding of the crucial role of the family as the primary transmitter of the social capital essential for self-reliance and betterment. Family structure is the primary predictor of social outcomes,...