Free Republic

A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves. The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land. Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.” “Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read,...

It's not as if we haven't already learned what a failure Barack Obama's green-tech stimulus has been in creating jobs. Solyndra collapsed with over a half-billion in taxpayer money out the door, wiping out a thousand jobs with it. After spending $17.2 billion of the $38.6 billion allocated for green-jobs stimulation, the programs have created a total of just over 3500 jobs, for a price tag of $4.85 million each. Now the Inspector General at the Department of Labor has recommended the shutdown of a green-jobs training program that has only placed 15% of its participants: A $500 million green...

Even as the American economy shows tentative signs of a rebound, the human toll of the recession continues to mount, with millions of Americans remaining out of work, out of savings and nearing the end of their unemployment benefits. Economists fear that the nascent recovery will leave more people behind than in past recessions, failing to create jobs in sufficient numbers to absorb the record-setting ranks of the long-term unemployed. Call them the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives -- potentially...

If you still have a job, maybe Friday's numbers from the Labor Department will give you a chance to exhale. Since the recession began in December 2007, the employment market, for the most part, has been one negative headline after another. Now, we've learned that the U.S. lost only 11,000 jobs in November, that the unemployment rate surprisingly ticked down from 10.2% the previous month to only 10%, and that for the prior two months the total of jobs lost actually wasn't as bad as initially thought. The last time the data were so bright, if they can be called...

Last week the Obama administration issued a report purporting to show that the President’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan had saved or created exactly 640,329 jobs. Such a precise number for such a fuzzy concept as jobs “saved or created” immediately raised doubts about the veracity of the report in any honest American’s mind. And since that report was issued, a once compliant press has filed story after story tearing the credibility of the Obama administration’s job creation claims to shreds. Just enter the words “stimulus”, “jobs”, and “report” in a Google News search and these are just some of...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US unemployment rate jumped to 10.2 percent in October as 190,000 jobs were shed, the government said Friday in data highlighting ongoing struggles of an economy emerging from recession. The Labor Department report, seen as one of the best indicators of economic momentum, showed a rise in the jobless rate, up from 9.8 percent in September, to the highest since 1983. But the number of jobs lost narrowed to the lowest level in over a year. The jobless rate shot above the key 10 percent barrier for the first time since June 1983, even though the...

On Friday, October 9th, the Administration formally swore in a New Assistant Secretary for Administration and Management at the Department of Labor. What’s News about that? The New Assitant Secretary is a Member of SEIU. According to an Article on the SEIU Blog, T. Michael Kerr, was sworn in as the New Assistant Secretary for the Administration and Management at the Department of Labor. Here is T. Michael Kerr’s Bio, according to the March White House Press Release announcing his nomination:

The story in a nutshell: Bertha Lewis is the CEO of ACORN. In a review of Lewis’s contacts list, which was leaked to RedState, Bertha Lewis has the office, cell phone, home number, and private personal email address of Patrick Gaspard. Patrick Gaspard holds Karl Rove’s position in the White House and was Obama’s Political Director during the campaign. In addition to Patrick, Bertha has Patrick’s brother Michael in her rolodex. She lists Michael as working at the Advance Group. The Advance Group is ACORN’s lobbying organization. In other words, besides having Obama’s political director’s contact info, the political director’s...

Unions should be required to make public more details of their internal finances, the Labor Department said Thursday as it proposed new changes to union disclosure forms. Unions are required every year to file financial disclosure forms with the Labor Department. But federal officials are proposing a more detailed form, and penalizing small unions who get into trouble with the law by banning them from filing a simple form. The proposed changes will be printed on Monday in the federal register. "This proposed rule provides union members with more complete information about union finances and will better protect their legal...

<p>A months-long Senate fight over proposed new rules on overtime pay for U.S. workers is threatening to derail a high-priority bill aimed at ending trade sanctions by Europe that could eventually cost American exporters $4 billion a year.</p> <p>The bill to substitute corporate tax cuts for export subsidies that have been outlawed by the World Trade Organization has broad, bipartisan support in the Senate. But the Senate is more closely divided over a Democratic proposal to add a provision that would block a Bush administration proposal to reduce overtime pay protections for many white-collar workers.</p>

<p>Who says the war on terror isn't going well?</p> <p>To read the media reports, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao visited the AFL-CIO's winter meeting last week and raised hell. But what really happened is that she told America's labor leaders the truth about union corruption and they just thought it was hell.</p>