Free Republic

For Americans who can’t find jobs, the booming demand for temp workers has been a path out of unemployment, but now many fear it’s a dead-end route. With full-time work hard to find, these workers have built temping into a de facto career, minus vacation, sick days or insurance. The assignments might be temporary — a few months here, a year there — but labor economists warn that companies’ growing hunger for a workforce they can switch on and off could do permanent damage to these workers’ career trajectories and retirement plans. “It seems to be the new norm in...

As the long-awaited debut of so-called Obamacare approaches, it should come as no surprise that the single largest piece of legislation ever written - that directly impacts one-sixth of the U.S. economy - is giving rise to lots and lots of unexpected outcomes, both positive and negative. - SNIP - ''We're trying to go to full time employment. We'd love to have people on 40 hours a week but the government is going in just the opposite direction," Funk says, noting that lower-waged hourly workers are particularly likely to see their shifts cut from 40 to 29 or 30 hours...