Free Republic

With 12 million Americans out of work the government agency responsible for advancing opportunities for profitable employment has gone on a frantic year-end spending spree, doling out tens of millions of dollars to foreign causes that won’t put a dent in the nation’s unemployment crisis. In the last few weeks of 2012, the Obama Department of Labor (DOL) generously dedicated nearly $40 million to global initiatives unlikely to help workers in this country. The money will go to efforts that strengthen unions and help combat child labor in African, central and South American countries. This includes $10 million to combat...

The funny thing about the Labor Department's monthly unemployment report is that the number-crunching bureaucrats act like they're delivering high carat diamonds when the real worth of what they're reporting is closer to the value of a mud pie. First, a college graduate with a degree in biomedical engineering who gets a $90,000 job in his field is counted exactly the same in the government's unemployment report as a biomedical engineering graduate who can't find a job and is working weekends as a bus boy at Applebee's. Or as the PBS Newshour succinctly stated it, "If you only worked one...

During the Republican Convention, Democrats took every available moment of air time to count the women's vote. "Republicans are anti-women," they chanted. And they frequently brought up this oft-repeated nugget: For doing essentially the same jobs, men get paid more than women. That claim is often combined with the complaint that whites get paid more than blacks and non-Hispanics get paid more than Hispanics. But are these assertions true? Let's take the Labor Department finding that women make 77% of what men make. To hear the backers of the Paycheck Fairness Act (PFA) tell it, this is prima facie...

Despite administration warnings that notices related to sequestration were unnecessary, Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney are continuing their preparations. Lockheed Martin and Pratt & Whitney are going forward with plans to issue layoff notices to thousands of employees due to looming defense cuts under sequestration, despite administration claims that such warnings are unnecessary. U.S. defense companies planned to start handing out pink slips in November under federal mandates outlined in the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, due to the anticipated $500 billion automatic cut to defense coffers are set to go in place in January. But administration...

The Labor Department has backed off a plan to force news agencies to use government-issued computers and other equipment to report on jobless reports and other key economic data, following a GOP-led House hearing this week, according to several published reports. Agency officials have said they want reporters who analyze, then write about economic reports inside their so-called “lock up” room to use U.S. computers, software and Internet lines so the government can further protect against such potential security breaches as hacking. But the plan also resulted in cries about potential free-speech violations and the government now having computer access...

The unilateral, unprecedented move by the Labor Department with this politically critical data has First Amendment proponents up in arms.The deadline is closing in on a Labor Department order requiring news organizations to use government computers and equipment to distribute sensitive economic data — including the politically important and sometimes unsavory monthly jobs report. Until now, reporters have been provided the Labor data shortly before the embargoed release time to analyze and draft their stories from a lock-up room at the department. When it’s release time, the Labor Department flips a switch to let news organizations transmit over secure lines...

One of the most egregious abuses of the Obama Administration's auto bailouts was the blatant favoritism evidenced in the treatment of Delphi (General Motors' parts supplier) retirees. After the Delphi bankruptcy, UAW retirees had their pensions "topped off" by General Motors, apparently with taxpayer money accessed through TARP. While the UAW retirees maintained their pension benefits, non-union, salaried retirees of Delphi lost theirs. There was no logical reason for one group to have their pensions saved while another group lost theirs, just the facts that the distributions were inequitable and the only difference between the groups was that one belonged...

- The U.S. Department of Labor announced Tuesday that it reached an agreement with the grain company Haasbach resolving 25 citations issued by the department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The agreement follows the fatal accidents of ...

The Labor Department today announced that it had approved Trade Adjustment Assistance for the former employees of the bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra. That means all of the firm’s 1,100 ex-employees are eligible for federal aid packages, including job retraining and income assistance. The department has valued packages at about $13,000 a head.

The Labor Department today announced that it had approved Trade Adjustment Assistance for the former employees of the bankrupt solar panel maker Solyndra. That means all of the firm’s 1,100 ex-employees are eligible for federal aid packages, including job retraining and income assistance. The department has valued packages at about $13,000 a head. Taxpayers will have to cough up yet another $14.3 million as a result of Solyndra’s bankruptcy. They are already on the hook for $528 million in federal loan guarantees to the company that are unlikely to ever be paid back. The department’s decision also bodes well for...

(CNSNews.com) - U.S. Department of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis today signed "partnership" agreements with ambassadors from a group of Latin American nationss aiming to protect what she described as the rights of both legal and illegal migrant workers laboring in the United States.During the signing ceremony hosted at Labor Department headquarters in Washington D.C., Solis said the agreements are aimed at educating migrant workers, regardless of how they got here, about their rights under U.S. law and to help prevent them from being abused in the workplace, either through wages, loss of job, or deportation.When asked by CNSNews.com, she made...

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis has taken her gloves off in the ongoing war within the states. And her supporters are aching for more. In a speech before a partisan audience at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. last Saturday, Solis proclaimed solidarity with Wisconsin public-sector unions and their supporters who have all but shut down the state legislature in protest of Republican Gov. Scott Walker's proposals to curb public spending. Speaking before the closing session of the Democratic National Committee winter meeting, she urged her troops: "The fight is on. We work together. We help those...

  When Department of Labor Solicitor M. Patricia "Trisha" Smith testified at a Senate confirmation hearing more than a year and a half ago, her track record as New York State Commissioner of Labor, and her comments about it, prompted leading Republicans to postpone action for several months. Their fears in hindsight appear well-founded. An article appearing in last Friday's Wall Street Journal reported that DOL staff, under Smith's supervision, a couple months earlier had issued a draft "operating plan" to dramatically step up enforcement against private-sector employers likely to have committed unfair labor practices. The details of the...

It is no secret in Washington, D.C. that the Obama administration’s vast bureaucracy is working overtime to prepare for the new Republican controlled House. The reason for this frenzy of preparation is the new oversight power that the House Republicans will have to peer in to what Obama’s cronies are up to behind the curtain. You can probably hear the loudest hum of shredders working double time at the Department of Labor. According to DOL emails, the department is working frantically to be prepared for what might happen in January. On December 14, the political staff at the Department of...

The U.S. jobless rate was flat at 9.6% in September, but the government’s broader measure of unemployment rose even more to 17.1%, the highest rate since April and down just slightly from the October 2009 high of 17.4%. The comprehensive gauge of labor underutilization, known as the “U-6″ for its data classification by the Labor Department, accounts for people who have stopped looking for work or who can’t find full-time jobs. The key to the rise in the broader unemployment rate was due to a 612,000 jump in the number of people employed part time but who would prefer full-time...

Despite a promise that he would not "rush" important votes before Massachusetts Sen.-elect Scott Brown is seated sometime next week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, has scheduled a Monday vote on the contentious nomination of M. Patricia Smith to be solicitor for the Department of Labor. Mrs. Smith, now New York's labor commissioner, has come under fire from conservatives and some business groups for the state's "Wage Watch" program. The project, which started in January 2009, enlisted unions and advocacy groups to visit private businesses, educate employers about labor laws and report potential wage violations to the government....

To hear President Obama tell it, he's been busy creating jobs since taking office. The $787 billion stimulus package, he said last winter, would "save or create 3.5 million jobs." The White House is touting reports from recipients of stimulus funds asserting that they have created or saved 640,000 jobs so far. Yet the national unemployment rate has now hit 10.2 percent, helping explain why Republicans won the governors' races in Virginia and New Jersey last week, just a year after the party's 2008 drubbing. And Obama declared Friday that more action is needed. "History tells us that job growth...

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...

President Obama's nominee for the top legal job at the Labor Department won a key committee vote Wednesday, but a Republican senator vowed to delay the confirmation on the Senate floor over what he called a "lack of candor" by New York Commissioner of Labor M. Patricia Smith during confirmation hearings. Sen. Michael B. Enzi of Wyoming, ranking Republican of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, announced he will place a hold on Ms. Smith's nomination after the committee voted 13-10 along party lines to send Ms. Smith's nomination as labor solicitor, the No. 3 post in...

The U.S. labor market weakened in September as 263,000 payroll jobs were lost and the unemployment rate rose a tenth to a 26-year high of 9.8%, the Labor Department reported. It was the 21st consecutive month of job losses.