Free Republic

Ford CEO Jim Farley joins "Barron's Roundtable" to discuss the debate on electric vs. gas cars, the auto company's growth and approach to the auto industry, and reacts to Warren Buffett's comments on investing in the industry. Ford is readying plans for its white-collar salaried employees to step in and keep parts flowing in the instance that its blue-collar union workers walk off the job next month amid threats that the United Auto Workers are preparing to strike at Detroit's Big Three automakers. The Detroit Free Press first reported that Ford is holding meetings with salaried workers like engineers to...

It appears burnt-out junior bankers aren’t the only white-collar workers who have seen their compensation improve over the past 12 months. According to a report published in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, America’s salaried employees are finally seeing wage gains commensurate with those experienced by (often lower-paid) hourly workers. Citing data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American professionals toward the end of this year saw their compensation jump at the fastest rate in nearly 20 years. Though that’s still slower than the pace of headline inflation, which is running at a YoY rate of nearly 7% according to the...

Weeks after Amazon reported blowout second-quarter results, including massive beats on the top line, and double-digit revenue growth YoY - supported by an explosion of online shopping amid the virus pandemic - the e-commerce giant is set to expand physical offices and add thousands of "white collar" jobs across the US according to a new report in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. The news of the hiring spree comes less than a week after the company announced plans to cut ties with small contract delivery firms across the country, costing 1,200 delivery drivers their jobs. And as all...

With just a point and a click, you can browse a face book of felons, a new government website that will warn of the danger these criminals pose to society.Only these are not the faces of sex offenders and serial killers. These criminals are mortgage schemers and inside traders, most likely armed with nothing more than an M.B.A. or a law degree.Their faces will soon appear online courtesy of the Utah Legislature, which on Wednesday approved a measure to build the nation’s first white-collar offender registry, appending a scarlet letter of sorts on the state’s financial felons. The registry —...

A Romanian man who has admitted stealing masterpieces by Gauguin, Monet and Picasso, wants to pin the blame on the Dutch museum for failing to protect the works, his lawyer said Tuesday. Radu Dogaru is among six Romanians on trial for the spectacular three-minute heist from the Kunthal museum in Rotterdam in October 2012 which stunned the art world. Despite their value, none of the paintings was equipped with an alarm, Dutch authorities have said.

Corzine off the crook - No criminal charges It’s official. Jon Corzine will not be cuffed over MF Global’s improper handling of customers’ funds leading up to the commodity brokerage firm’s spectacular collapse in late 2011, The Post has learned. Federal investigators have found no evidence that the disgraced Wall Street titan broke the law. “After 18 months of investigation, the criminal probe into Jon Corzine is now being dropped,” a person with knowledge of the probe told The Post. “There is no evidence of criminal wrongdoing,” this person said. The Justice Department’s decision to drop the case is sure...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Cheryl in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the Indianapolis Colts' flags are at half-mast. CALLER: (chuckles) Hi, Rush. RUSH: Hi. CALLER: Thanks for taking my call. RUSH: You bet. CALLER: I wanted to talk about the crony capitalism from a personal standpoint for myself. My husband was an engineer with Delphi, which is part of GM. And when the bankruptcy was taken care of and the auto bailouts and the whole thing that Obama's so proud of, what most people don't know is what happened to the salaried retirees from Delphi in the whole deal. The union people...

About 4,000 more salaried workers at General Motors Corp. will lose their jobs by the end of the year as the automaker continues to downsize.

My Dear Brother just sent me a link to this article by Matthew B. Crawford, author of the forthcoming Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Reminds me of Robert Pirsig... just less depressing. Gotta say, it really resonates with me. In my younger (and poorer) days, I spent a lot of time "wrenching" on my own car (out of necessity) and for friends (out of desire for beer and pizza). I was far from a professional mechanic, but I could fix lots of stuff that it would otherwise cost of lot of money to pay...

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The FBI, after years spent focusing on national security, is struggling to find agents and resources to investigate wrongdoing tied to the country's economic crisis, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions. Citing current and former FBI officials, the Times said cutbacks in its criminal investigative workforce following the September 11 attacks left the FBI weaker in areas like white collar crime. The cutbacks were the result of a shift in focus to terrorism and intelligence matters. More than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all those in criminal programs, moved into those areas, the...

Former CA Chief To Plead Guilty Sanjay Kumar, former chief executive officer of Computer Associates International Inc., is expected to plead guilty to financial fraud charges later today. People familiar with the situation said Mr. Kumar and his co-defendant Stephen Richards, a former top sales executive, will appear in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn today at 2 p.m. Details of the expected guilty pleas weren't immediately available. ... The executives were indicted in September 2004 on financial fraud charges in connection with allegedly back-dated contracts that allowed the business software giant to appear to meet financial goals by continuing to...

See this thread first. The man who invented the "cube" Admits that he feels like a rube A box with a hole that steals your soul and reduces your status to "noob"

Recent research by behavioral psychologists might shed some light on why President Bush had difficulty in selling his concept of private retirement accounts as a central feature of reforming Social Security. As you might recall, the president promoted the plan through the idea of moving to an "ownership society" and providing the opportunity of choice regarding our retirement funds. However, according to a team of psychologists from Swarthmore and Stanford, who discussed the results of their work recently in the New York Times, Americans do not uniformly welcome more choices into their lives. Specifically, whereas higher income, better educated individuals...

The word "reinvent" is a dumb term, having an overtone of redundancy. After all, when you have invented something, it exists. You can revise it or change it, but you can't "reinvent" it after you have already invented it. I never heard the term when I first entered the workforce. But somewhere in the 1970s or so, corporate executives-began using the word, and using it a lot. Then as now, the nation had its usual economic ups and downs, but suddenly after one downturn, our nation was heavily laden with companies that had reinvented themselves. What happened is that after...

For decades economists have insisted that the U.S. wins from globalization. Now they're not so sure But the bulk of this work is labor-intensive and lower skilled and can be done more efficiently by countries that have an abundance of less-educated workers. in the long run a more disruptive trend may be the fast-rising tide of white-collar jobs shifting to cheap-labor countries. "...nobody has a clue about what the numbers are," says Robert C. Feenstra, [UC-Davis] -- competition is coming on in the products such as software. If the new competition drives down prices too much, U.S. export earnings will...

The staffer said, Well, we can’t take the risk that he’s known to be seeing an expert on lying. Ekman rather liked Clinton, and wanted Clinton’s ‘trademark expression,’ to have been no more than a meaningless facial tic.

Bracing for the Blow By BOB HERBERT .B.M. has sent a holiday chill through its American employees with its plans to ship thousands of high-paying white-collar jobs overseas to lower-paid foreign workers. "People are upset and angry," said Arnie Marchetti, a 37-year-old computer technician at I.B.M.'s Southbury, Conn., office whose wife gave birth to their first child in August. The company has not made any announcements, and the employees do not know who will be affected, or when. The uncertainty about whose jobs may be sent to India or China, the two main countries in the current plans, has...

CHICAGO, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- For the first time since tracking began 20 years ago, U.S. women outnumber men in higher paying, white collar managerial and professional occupations. The gap will continue because of a self-perpetuating cycle of workplace gains for women, according to international outplacment firm Chicago-based Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "As a growing number [of women] move into upper management roles, those [women] further down the ladder will reap the benefits by increasingly being targeted for advancement," said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.Read more...

<p>The last Labor Day that looked worse in terms of joblessness than 2003's was in '93. We won't know the unemployment rate for August until this Friday, but in July it ran 6.2%, and based on respondents' answers in August on whether jobs were hard to get or plentiful (see chart below), the likely range is 6.2% to 6.4%.</p>

On the morning of Feb. 5, Robert Wood waited outside his Circuit City store with a handful of other employees. They had been told to report for a quick meeting before the store opened. Aware that the company was beset with financial difficulties, Mr. Wood was relieved to see that the others waiting were, like him, among the store's top salesmen. A seven-year veteran of Circuit City Stores Inc., Mr. Wood was the second highest-paid performer at the Jensen Beach, Fla., store, moving more than $1 million in computers and consumer electronics last year, he says. He earned $54,000 in...