Free Republic

Quick — someone check to see if the Koch Brothers have bought Time Warner Cable News! Harry Reid needs to know, after all, because all of these “horror stories” about ObamaCare are just lies. Actually, we may need to see if the Kochs have bought all of New York, because small-business owners are discovering that Reid’s law does anything but “bend the cost curve downward” (via Daniel Halper):CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO ,/H4> “Everything is on hold. We won’t grow. We won’t reach that threshold. It is not worth it for us,” says pet store owner Matt Sames.The reporter...

Amazon.com Inc. and The Home Depot Inc., both giants in their respective retail fields, are heralding the arrival of spring with major hiring surges. E-commerce king Amazon said it will take on more than 2,500 full-time workers in several states as the company’s stable of fulfillment centers expands. The employees will be hired to pick, pack and ship customer orders at facilities in Virginia, Kansas, South Carolina, Washington and Tennessee. The online retailer said it hired more than 20,000 fulfillment center workers last year and that the median pay at the sites is 30% higher than the pay at traditional...

<p>Ask agency execs to tick off the biggest challenges they face, and they’ll mention talent. More specifically, attracting young talent. Agencies are dependent on armies of young workers across all disciplines.</p> <p>The other side of this thirst for young talent is a familiar one to anyone in business: the newest generation of workers often seems, well, different from other generations. Much has been made of the millennials. They’re confident. They’re optimistic. They’re an ADD generation. They’re suffering from separation anxiety after having spent their early years receiving the constant attention of helicopter parenting and winning trophies for finishing in 16th place. They have been told they’re the best, and their opinion is equal to anyone else’s, even those far older and more experienced than them.</p>

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is looking exclusively for an “economically disadvantaged woman owned small business” when it awards its next $30 million contract for security training. The agency announced a solicitation for a company to conduct training for its Inter-Modal Security and Training Exercise Program (I-Step) last week. [Snip] Contracting offices are required to set quotas for hiring EDWOSBs by the Small Business Act, which was enacted in January. According to the law, women are “subjected to discrimination in entrepreneurial endeavors due to their gender” and it is “in the national interest” to “remove discriminatory barriers.” The act sets...

At least one state has gone to court to fight the Obama administration’s preposterous new regulation limiting employers’ rights to ban hiring felons because it discriminates against minorities. It’s been an ongoing battle between a number of companies and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency that enforces the nation’s workplace discrimination, for years. Under Obama the agency has dedicated extensive resources to go after businesses that check criminal background records to screen job applicants. In 2012 the EEOC officially adopted guidelines that limit employers’ ability to exclude felons from jobs. The agency has also sued companies for...

Bob LoterMUSCATINE, Iowa — When Bob Loter gives a talk to employers about hiring veterans to fill job openings, he knows what he’s talking about. He’s a veteran himself. Loter, the veterans program coordinator for Iowa Workforce Development, served for 20 years in the U.S. Army in the infantry and as a recruiter — two of those years recruiting people in Muscatine. With foot problems and hearing loss suffered during his years as a soldier, he’s also a disabled veteran. “I can’t run up a hill anymore in my combat boots,” he said with a smile. Loter delivered a “Hiring...

At our company, we work to fill our roster with “athletes.” I don’t mean this necessarily in the physical sense, although it turns out that quite a few of our members are literal athletes – we have a national-class triathlete, I have a personal interest in competitive and recreational bodybuilding, and there are multiple marathoners, bikers, soccer, and basketball players, CrossFit enthusiasts, etc. on staff. We also have a companywide interest in health and fitness, which we call “Fishbowl FIT.” But when I advise people to seek and hire athletes, what I am really referring to is the athlete traits...

Arizona Republican Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake were forthcoming Tuesday during a Mesa, Ariz., town hall when they were asked whether employers might be driven to hire immigrants over American workers because those individuals wouldn´t be eligible for health care under the Affordable Care Act. "I am not denying that this will be an issue, and will be a problem" McCain said. The confession stunned some in the audience who expected an architect of the Senate´s immigration bill to squash any notion that his bill would displace American workers. But under the Senate´s immigration bill, which passed by a

An odd puzzle is taking shape in the labor market: Over the past three years, the number of job openings has risen almost 50 percent, but actual hiring has gone up by less than 5 percent. Companies are advertising a lot more jobs, in other words, but not filling them. To get some sense of how significant this is, consider that if, since June 2010, hiring had risen a third as much as advertised jobs have (rather than only a 10th), and nothing else were different, job creation would be roughly 500,000 higher each month, and the unemployment rate would...

The immigration bill passed by the Senate Thursday afternoon would give some employers a financial incentive to employ "registered provisional immigrants" (illegal immigrants granted legal status) instead of U.S. citizens. As the Washington Examiner's Philip Klein recently reported: "Under Obamacare, businesses with over 50 workers that employ American citizens without offering them qualifying health insurance could be subject to fines of up to $3,000 per worker. But because newly legalized immigrants wouldn’t be eligible for subsidies on the Obamacare exchanges until after they become citizens – at least 13 years under the Senate bill – businesses could avoid such fines...

The “Help Wanted” sign is out again in America. But it’s not what you think. A report from the newswire Reuters says that massive hiring is in effect for Obamacare with state and federal agencies hiring both directly and issuing grants to community organizations to act as kind of insurance agents, signing up as many people to Obamacare as possible under the law. “State offices that will run insurance exchanges are hiring tens of thousands,” reports Reuters, “either on staff or through outsourcing firms. Federal agencies that are key to implementing the law, such as the Internal Revenue Service, plan...

Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits rose by 18,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 354,000. Despite the gain, the level remains consistent with moderate job growth. The Labor Department said Thursday that the less volatile four-week average increased by 2,500 to 348,250. Applications are a proxy for layoffs. Since January, they have fallen 6 percent. That suggests companies are cutting fewer jobs. At the same time, hiring has been steady, despite an increase in taxes on Jan. 1 and steep federal spending cuts that began in March. Solid consumer spending and a rebound in housing have helped the economy weather...

Should it be a federal crime for businesses to refuse to hire ex-convicts? Yes, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which recently released 20,000 convoluted words of regulatory "guidance" to direct businesses to hire more felons and other ex-offenders. In the late 1970s, the EEOC began stretching Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to sue businesses for practically any hiring practice that adversely affected minorities. In 1989, the agency sued Carolina Freight Carrier Corp. of Hollywood, Fla., for refusing to hire as a truck driver a Hispanic man who had multiple arrests and had served 18 months...

The gloves are coming off. We're 11 months from full implementation and the real-world impact of Obamacare is hitting the newswires. Taco Bell and Wendy's just cut the hours of hundreds of employees to avoid the Obamacare employer health insurance mandate. These workers will not only not have health insurance, they will have less money to pay for it and may be forced into Medicaid under the individual mandate. Now, the Internal Revenue Service is warning employers not to avoid the employer mandate. The IRS issued a 144-page notice which says they will soon issue proposed regulations with "anti-abuse rules."...

The real knife twist in this USA Today piece is the money quote from Mark Zandi, The One’s go-to "independent" economist: Many businesses plan to bring on more part-time workers next year, trim the hours of full-time employees or curtail hiring because of the new health care law, human resource firms say. Their actions could further dampen job growth, which already is threatened by possible federal budget cutbacks resulting from the tax increases and spending cuts known as the fiscal cliff. "It will have a negative impact on job creation" in 2013, says Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics…The...

A survey to be released today finds few employers are planning to hire during the fourth quarter, another blow to President Obama, whose re-election may hinge on whether the economy improves before Election Day. “Between the uncertainty in the global economy and the uncertainty of the election, the survey results are really not surprising,” said Susan Fontana, regional vice president at ManpowerGroup, the global staffing agency that interviewed more than 18,000 employers nationwide for the survey. “In an election year, we see more of a stalling pattern. Then businesses start to move forward with their plans.” Of the more than...

A class action lawsuit was filed in California this week alleging that the popular In-N-Out burger chain discriminates against people of color.

My twenty something liberal Obama voter colleague (with a stay at home wife and two young children) cited this tidbit of news which I'm thinking is as pumped up as the "jobs" numbers at the White Hut--Anybody care to debunk? Largest IT employment gains in four years reported Network World (US) The nation's employment outlook for IT professionals has suddenly surged, gaining 18,200 jobs, the largest monthly increase since 2008, according to tech employment-research firm Foote Partners.

American companies are scaling back plans to hire workers and a rising share of firms feel the European debt crisis is taking a bite out of their sales, a survey showed on Monday. Only 23 percent of the firms polled in June plan to add to staff in the next six months, the National Association for Business Economics said on Monday. NABE's prior survey, conducted in late March and early April, had shown 39 percent of companies planning to add workers. Already, hiring by U.S. companies has slowed dramatically in recent months as employers worry about a sagging global economy...

Yesterday, Barack Obama responded to criticism of his plan to hike taxes on those earning as little as $250,000 a year --- a class which includes a large number of small-business owners --- by claiming that those entrepreneurs have no greater friend than the current President. He pointed to a number of tax breaks and credits he championed for small businesses, and dismissed the effects of hiking their taxes now: Now, we can already anticipate — we know what those who are opposed to letting the high-end tax cuts expire will say. They’ll say that we can’t tax “job creators.”...