Free Republic

Gov. Andrew Cuomo wasn’t taking any chances that there might be empty seats at a speech he delivered last week on climate change — so state workers were summoned on the taxpayer dime to fill the audience, The Post has learned. The workers said they left their jobs in the middle of the day Thursday and were paid their full salaries to hear Cuomo at Columbia University announce the state was joining a global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “I’d rather be at the park,” said one of the workers, who is employed by the state Office of Parks,...

Monday, September 14, 2015 Government workers outnumber manufacturing workers in Illinois By Michael Lucci / Illinois Policy Institute - The top-producing states of the Midwest’s manufacturing powerhouse are Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin. But Illinois is the only one of the Great Lakes states where government workers dramatically outnumber manufacturing workers, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As of June 2015, Illinois had only 574,000 factory workers, compared with nearly 750,000 state and local government workers. That means Illinois had only 3 manufacturing workers for every 4 state and local government workers. http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2015/09/government-workers-outnumber-manufacturing-workers-in-illinois.html

To fire a government employee, all you need is the will and the skill. This may sound simplistic given all the protections granted to civil servants and the complexities of federal human resources case law, but it’s true. What does it mean to have the will? It means having the strength to remove a poor employee when it is the right thing to do.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal regulators have approved a long-delayed rule requiring companies to reveal the pay gap between CEOs and their employees. The Securities and Exchange Commission voted Wednesday to order most public companies to disclose the ratio between their chief executives' annual compensation and median, or midpoint, employee pay.

An East Dallas woman is outraged after she claims one U.S. Census worker showed up at her door for a housing survey and would not take “no” for an answer. Sonia Platz said the worker went as far as to camp out in her yard as she waited for Platz to change her mind. “She’s ringing the bell, knocking on the door. And I’m like, ‘I don’t want to participate.’” Said Platz The East Dallas resident said it started with a series of three letters from the U.S. Census Bureau. A few days later after receiving the third later, a...

With the rise of flexible working schedules, the freelance economy, and video conferencing, more Americans are getting their jobs done without ever heading into an office, according to new data from the American Time Use Survey released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Among all workers, 23% report spending all or part of their day working from home. That’s up from less than 19% in 2003, the first year for which there’s comparable data.

Congress should not grant President Barack Obama authority to conclude another free trade agreement in Asia, because it would lower American wages and exacerbate income inequality. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would eliminate tariffs and lower other regulatory barriers to trade and investment among the United States, South Korea, Japan and nine other Pacific Rim nations. In March 2012, President Obama inaugurated a free trade pact with South Korea and in many ways, it provides a template for what we may expect from a broader TPP. Imports from South Korea are up 3.6 billion, U.S. exports are down marginally and the...

Gov. Scott Walker wants to make the most public fight of his administration a national issue should he run for president. In an interview with Radio Iowa, the Wisconsin Republican made the case for a national “right to work” law: “As much as I think the federal government should get out of most of what it’s in right now, I think establishing fundamental freedoms for the American people is a legitimate thing and that would be something that would provide that opportunity in the other half of America to people who don’t have those opportunities today.”Currently, twenty-five states have right-to-work...

Republican candidate Hal Heiner announced today his proposal to implement E-Verify in Kentucky, a measure to ensure that Kentucky jobs go to legal Kentucky workers. The E-Verify program allows employers to identify the immigration status of potential hires by checking names against government databases. E-Verify comes at no cost to employers. Heiner’s proposal would require the use of E-Verify to confirm legal worker status for all employers, government employees and government contractors and subcontractors.

What could get self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders and rock-ribbed Republican Jim Inhofe to agree? The two senators have teamed up in their support for an investigative enquiry into the billion-dollar utility Southern California Edison, which has been firing American tech workers and replacing them with lower-paid foreign workers brought here through the controversial H-1B visa program. And now the first lawsuit has been filed in response to the H-1B visa fallout at SCE. The plaintiff, Save Jobs USA, is a group of former veteran employees at SCE who after their firing were forced to train the foreign workers due to...

Commentary By Portrait of Patrick Tyrrell Patrick Tyrrell There was good news this month: private-sector job openings rose slightly in February, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Openings rose to 3.8 percent of all private-sector jobs and the job openings—the highest rate since January 2001. Other data for the month showed the unemployment rate for workers age 25-54 (often called prime age workers) ticked downward to 4.6 percent from 4.8 percent.

It's not about finding workers; it's about finding the right workers.According to the latest supplemental survey from the New York Fed's manufacturing and business leaders surveys, employers in the New York area are facing two main problems: finding workers who can show up on time and workers who can hold a conversation.The survey showed that in April, 65% of manufacturing employers had difficulty finding punctual workers and 60% had trouble finding workers with interpersonal skills.Among business leaders, a broader survey group, 42% had trouble finding punctual workers while about 48% had trouble finding workers with interpersonal skills. These results also...

The deadline for temporary foreign workers to either become permanent residents or leave the country arrived Wednesday, leaving thousands of would-be Canadians scrambling. In 2001, the Conservatives set a deadline of April 1, 2015, for temporary foreign workers in low-skilled jobs who have been in Canada for more than four years to leave. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business says that leaves thousands of potential Canadians in jeopardy of deportation as their permanent residency applications are yet to be fully processed. The CFIB is calling for a faster track to residency for foreign workers in low-skilled jobs. "CFIB commended the...

The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor ‎force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers. As an example, the American Transportation Research Institute estimates there are 30,000 – 35,000 trucker jobs that could be filled tomorrow if workers would take these jobs–a shortage that could rise to 240,000 by 2022. While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful;...

Because this column is devoted to promoting Catholic fatherhood, this is a special feast day: the Feast of Saint Joseph. The following is an updated version of a column that John wrote a few years ago. Men in history are often remembered for things like winning a battle, governing a country, composing a symphony, writing a masterpiece, or inventing a life-changing device. Today, the Church honors a man who did none of these.  Even in his own time, in the eyes of much of the world, this small-town carpenter was insignificant. But his greatness did not lie in his...

FRESNO (KMJ) -- Investigators are now trying to find out who was responsible for a brawl at a Fresno DMV. The fight saw furniture being thrown around and people running for cover - in the DMV on Olive and Weber. One of the chairs thrown across the room even shattered a counter top. It was captured on internal surveillance cameras and on onlooker's cell phones. Gabrielle Forman told our news partner KMPH Fox 26 News she was only there to change the registration on a car.

(CNSNews.com)- House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer said on the House floor on Tuesday that if Congress did not pass a Department of Homeland Security funding bill by the end of the week, it would shut down the department—but that 200,000 of the department’s 230,000 employees would still go to work. The other 30,000 employees are not deemed “essential” workers. “The Department of Homeland Security will not be funded,” said Hoyer. “There are 230,000 people who work at that Department, and 30,000 of them, mostly administrative personnel, will be laid off. The others, known as critically important important—essential employees who are...

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said Tuesday at a Senate Banking Committee hearing that the U-6 unemployment rate--which includes people who are working part-time for economic reasons and those who are marginally attached to the labor force--“definitely shows a less rosy picture” of employment in the country. People "marginally attached" to the labor force "are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for one work sometime in the past 12 months." In January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the "U-3" unemployment...

Myles Udland February 9, 2015 Millennials are storming back into the work force. Friday's monthly jobs report showed that in January nonfarm payrolls grew by 257,000 in the US. And with revisions to recent reports, the past three months were the strongest for job creation in the US in 17 years. The main driving force behind this trend? Millennials. Workers between the ages of 25 and 34 have been surging back into the workforce over the past several years, with this trend really taking off in 2014. (snip)

To everything there is a season and now is the time for election dissection. How do we reconcile an electorate that raised the minimum wage everywhere possible and opted for Republicans who profess not to believe in it? And what do we make of the – even for America – pathetically low turnout? One-third of Americans struggle to make ends meet. That’s 106 million people who often don’t know how they’ll pay rent, get childcare or retire. Even in our fractious America, that’s a large group with shared interests – decent wages, reliable work hours, affordable child and health care,...