Free Republic

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.

Four Republican senators have withdrawn their support for Labor Secretary nominee Andrew Puzder after he admitted to hiring an undocumented immigrant as his housekeeper, Law Newz reported. Per sources, Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Tim Scott, and Johnny Isakson have all said they will not support Puzder, a chief executive of Hardee's parent company, because of all the hiccups ahead of his confirmation hearing. Puzder said in a statement Feb. 6 he and his wife had employed a housekeeper for three years but didn't know she was in the U.S. illegally. "When I learned of her status, we immediately ended...

Labor Secretary Thomas Perez learned a harsh lesson this month. Public servants at federal agencies cannot allow their political preferences to guide their regulatory agenda. Rather, they must fulfill the mission of the agency as Congress intended. The folks over at the Department of Labor (DOL) do not seem to comprehend that. Once again, a court has issued an injunction against a DOL regulation. This time it was President Obama’s signature overtime rule, finalized on May 23, 2016, which would more than double the salary threshold for overtime eligible employees from $23,660 to $47,892. On November 22, 2016, Judge Amos...

Time’s running out on the Obama administration and its ability to extend its regulatory adventurism, an end emphasized by a federal judge in Texas yesterday — or at least a pause. Twenty-one states sued the Department of Labor over new rules that would have extended overtime pay to around four million salaried Americans, and Judge Amos Mazzant issued a temporary injunction to keep it from being enforced as planned on December 1st: (video at link) A Texas judge ruled Tuesday to put the brakes on federal rules that would have expanded overtime pay to more than 4 million workers. A...

A coalition of 21 states sued the U.S. Department of Labor Tuesday over a new rule that would make about 4 million higher-earning workers eligible for overtime pay, slamming the measure as inappropriate federal overreach from the Obama Administration. Republican Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Eastern Texas, urging it to block implementation before the regulation takes effect on Dec. 1. Laxalt, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama’s policies, said the rule would burden private and public sectors by straining budgets and forcing layoffs or cuts in working hours. “This rule, pushed...

The Department of Labor has awarded Utica, New York, $2 million to teach young refugees how to build drones as part of a summer jobs program. About 400 teenage refugee students living in the city will get part-time summer jobs through the program, as well as tutoring in English and Math. Those who demonstrate academic competence will then take part in a year-long drone building challenge during the school year, as the work and tutoring continues. The 14- and 15-year-old refugee students will learn how to design a drone and then construct their own model using the lab of the...

Regulations: With the flick of his magic pen, President Obama will soon grant millions of workers overtime play. At least, that's the fantasy being peddled by the White House and regurgitated by a credulous press.

An economist at the U.S. Department of Labor quickly put her gears in reverse after sending out a tweet comparing Christians to Nazis. Elizabeth Ashack deleted her tweet that read “people in the red states vote for nazis to govern, and then call themselves Christian, it will not end well for them. #BoycottIndiana,” but not before screenshots were taken by several astute Twitter users. Ashack, an employee of the department since 1998, according to the Daily Caller, also removed “Economist at US Department of Labor BLS” from her Twitter profile after people began calling her out for the remark. That...

The Department of Labor coordinated with the White House on whether or not to release hidden portions of former Labor Secretary Hilda Solis’ schedule as Solis battled an FBI investigation into her illegal fundraising for President Obama. New emails provided to The Daily Caller from the nonprofit legal research firm Cause of Action show the White House thanking the Department of Labor for “flagging” a public information request for “withheld” portions of Solis’ schedule. (SEE THE EMAIL CHAIN). The White House then asked for the name of the conservative group making the request — information that Labor officials were eager...

The jobs report looks good. The jobs report wasn’t as bad as anticipated. There are fewer people working, but that’s okay - the unemployment rate still dropped last month. Are you fed up with the U.S. federal government’s “spin” and constant efforts to convince you that the labor market isn’t as bad as it seems? At the beginning of each month, the U.S. Department of Labor tabulates the number of employment positions that were created the month before. Journalists and pundits are always eager to publicize what has come to be loosely known as the “jobs report,” with headlines that...

A report yesterday from Government Executive detailed how the Obama Administration's predictions of doom and gloom from sequestration has backfired. The predictions of furloughs for government workers, nearly across the board, were exaggerated. The most significant example of furlough reductions has been the Defense Department. The Pentagon originally planned to furlough all 750,000 of its civilian employees for 22 days. It then used reprogramming to trim that number to 11 days, and more recently -- through a series of cost-cutting measures and inter-service transfer of funds -- reduced the days of unpaid leave to six. The furloughs are now estimated...

What happens when the U.S. Secretary of Labor visits a church in Charlotte? If an incident earlier this month is any indication, faulty political promises and destructive economic policies continue to spread. It took place on April 3rd. Acting U.S. Labor Secretary Seth Harris made an appearance at a Baptist Church in North Carolina’s largest city, along with Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx. He was visiting to promote President Obama’s proposal of elevating the federal minimum wage requirement from the current $7.25 to $9.00 an hour. Harris and Foxx gathered in a large room within a Baptist church building. They sat...

So tell me, patriot, have you ever heard of ILAB ? Nope. Do they fix iphones ?Well, not exactly. ILAB is yet another dangerous Marxist-style agency in our bloated Federal Leviathan that almost no one has ever heard of. ILAB is an acronym for "Bureau of International Affairs" and is a sub-bureaucracy of the Department of Labor. It's stated mission is this: *** "The Bureau of International Labor Affairs (ILAB) leads the U.S. Department of Labor’s efforts to ensure that workers around the world are treated fairly and are able to share in the benefits of the global economy. ILAB’s...

The debate last Wednesday has reset the presidential race. Those who thought President Obama was a shoo-in or that Republican nominee Mitt Romney was a lost cause had their perceptions turned on their heads during the debate. Romney appeared confident, enthusiastic, engaged, knowledgeable -- in contrast, Obama appeared disinterested, arrogant and confused about why he had to endure such an event. His body language appeared to be saying: "Why am I here, wasting my time against this guy? I have better things to do -- I could be on 'The View,' I could be hanging with Beyonce and Jay-Z." Since...

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...