Free Republic

Although stock portfolios may be looking bleak with the sudden fall in the market indices, employment prospects for job seekers have never looked better. I don't have a crystal ball, but there are some strong indicators that 2016 has much to offer in terms of achieving our career aspirations. Currently there are more jobs available than job seekers. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the current unemployment rate is trending downward, a positive sign for all us -- it was 4.9% in January, down from 5% the previous month. In some parts of our country, we have unemployment rates...

[...] Its supporters, including the Obama administration, have touted the H-1B as a way to inject highly sought-after skills into the US talent pool. But more often, critics say, big companies exploit it to reduce labor costs, leaving more and more skilled American tech workers out of a job. "There are literally tens of thousands of American workers who have trained their foreign replacements," says Ronil Hira, a public policy professor at Howard University and a leading authority on H-1Bs. "And the workers being imported have no more than ordinary skills that are abundantly available in the US." [...] it...

With the Fed on the verge of a full relent and admission of policy error, the Fed's "data (in)dependent" monetary policy once again takes on secondary relevance as we progress into 2016. However, even with the overall job picture far less important, one aspect of the US jobs market is certain to take on an unprecedented importance. We first laid out what that is last September when we said that "the one chart that matters more than ever, has little to nothing to do with the Fed's monetary policy, but everything to do with the November 2016 presidential elections...

"Americans are working," President Obama proudly declared at a White House press conference Friday morning. He was referring to the new jobs report that revealed unemployment has dropped to 4.9 percent - the first time it's fallen below 5 percent in 8 years. The president also remarked on how his administration has added 14 million new jobs over his tenure and that over the past 6 months wages have risen at an impressive rate. He couldn't help pointing to falling gas prices as well. After gleefully sharing these new numbers, Obama quipped that the supposedly successful economy is "inconvenient" for...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: We have an audio sound bite here from Obama, the press conference I mentioned an hour ago. He went out there and he was praising his economy. He was heralding first-time unemployment rate as being under 5% for the first time in seven years. That's essentially since he took office. The first time. When have you ever heard that referred to: "The first-time unemployment rate is now at 4.9%"? What's that? Does anybody have any memory of hearing the unemployment rate referred to as "the first-time unemployment rate"? Well, there's a reason he said it. It's because...

The U.S. labor force is expected to expand only slowly over the coming decade as the country ages and more Americans give up on holding a job, a potential drag on broader economic growth. The economy is expected to generate 9.8 million new jobs, a 6.5% increase, from 2014 to 2024, the Labor Department said in new projections released Tuesday. While steady, that is a historically slow pace. By comparison, 10-year job creation averaged almost 14% during the 2001-07 expansion and close to 17% during the 1990s. The slowdown highlights declining participation as baby boomers retire and younger Americans opt...

In another sign that the labor market slack, at least from the Fed's perspective, is now reaching a peak, the Household survey reported that while the civilian labor force rose by over 300K in October, the number of people not in the labor force actually declined by 97K to 94.5MM (as those employed rose by 320K), following an exodus from the labor force of over half a million in September. Despite this headline improvement, however, the participation rate remained at 62.4%, same as the prior month, and at a level last seen in 1977.  Elsewhere, the civilian employment to...

Thanks in part to advances like email, Facebook, and Twitter, mail carriers will be all but obsolete in the not-so-distant future. By 2022, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 28% decline in postal-service jobs, totaling around 139,100 fewer positions. Mail carriers aren't the only ones whose jobs are disappearing. Technology and market shifts have affected a wide range of fields. Based on the BLS's occupational outlook data, here are 15 American jobs that are on their way out. 1. Printing worker According to the BLS, printing workers inspect random samples during print runs to identify problems and make...

The federal government uses very carefully manipulated numbers to cover up the crushing economic depression that is going on in this nation. For the month of September, the federal government told us that 142,000 jobs were added to the economy. If that was actually true, that would barely be enough to keep up with population growth. Sadly, the truth is that the real numbers were actually far worse than that. The unadjusted numbers show that the U.S. economy actually lost 248,000 jobs in September and the government added more than a million Americans to the “not in the labor force”...

LONDON (Reuters) - Gains for European and Asia stocks capped a wild week for financial markets on Friday, ahead of a key U.S. jobs report that could determine the chances of the Federal Reserve raising interest rates before year-end. Concerns about U.S. monetary policy and slowdown in emerging markets led by China have hit commodities markets and related stocks like Glencore and sent credit spreads wider this week in the wake of a summertime surge in volatility. An escalation of fighting in Syria, with Russian air strikes marking its biggest Middle East intervention in decades, has so far failed to...

There are 3,553,000 more foreign-born workers employed today than when President Obama took office in January 2009, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).There are currently close to 25 million foreign-born workers employed in the United States, and this number increased by 14,000 in September. In January 2009, when the president took office, there were only 21,928,000 foreign-born workers employed.The BLS does not distinguish between legal immigrants who are permitted to work here and illegal aliens in this data set.While the number of employed foreign-born workers is increasing, the number of native-born workers has declined. For the...

For a third month in a row, native-born Americans saw their job numbers tumble while immigrants experience solid gains. According to the montly Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers just released, "foreign-born" jobs numbers increased by 14,000, while those for "native-born" Americans fell off a cliff, by 262,000. Over the past three months, the job numbers for native-born have dropped by nearly 1 million, exactly the number of jobs President Obama promised to add when he ran for re-election in 2012. During that period, jobs for immigrants grew 218,000.

<p>The U.S. economy added only 142,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.1 percent.</p> <p>Analysts had forecast growth of a much more robust 206,000 jobs and an unchanged unemployment rate.</p> <p>Wages were flat in In September, with average hourly earnings at $25.09, following a 9-cent gain in August. Hourly earnings have risen by 2.2 percent over the year. Average hourly earnings of private-sector production and nonsupervisory employees were unchanged at $21.08 in September, the department said.</p>

While the September jobs number was an absolute disaster, here is the real punchline: in September, the people not in the labor force soared by a whopping 579,000 to a record 94.6 million, up from the previous record 94.0, even as number of people employed - according to the household survey used to calculate the "5.1%" unemployment rate - tumbled by 236,000 to 148.8 million. And as a result of this latest surge in people who aren't working, nor want to work, the participation rate crashed yet again, and sliding from 62.6% to 62.4%, it was the lowest since October...

The Obama administration is telling us that the unemployment rate in the United States has fallen to 5.1 percent, but does that number actually bear any resemblance to reality? On Friday, news outlets all over America celebrated the fact that the U.S. economy added 173,000 jobs in August. We were told that the unemployment rate has fallen to a seven year low and that wages are going up. So everything must be getting better for the middle class, right? After all, isn’t that what the official numbers are telling us? The financial markets are buzzing over this news because...

While the kneejerk headling scanning algos are focusing on the seasonally-adjusted headline monthly NFP increase which came in a worse than expected 173K, the presidential candidates - especially the GOP - are far more focused on another data point: the labor force participation rate, and the number of Americans not in the labor force. Here, they will have some serious ammo, because according to the BLS, the main reason why the unemployment rate tumbled to the lowest since April 2008 is because another 261,000 Americans dropped out of the labor force, as a result pushing the total number of...

There were 56,085,000 women 16 or older who did not participate in the nation’s labor force in June, as the labor force participation rate dropped to 56.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This means that 56,085,000 women did not have a job or actively seek one in the past four weeks. The civilian labor force, which consists of all people in the civilian noninstitutional population who either had a job during the month or actively sought a job declined in June to 73,547,000 from the 73,577,000 in the labor force in May. …

The reason why despite the better than expected increase in jobs the US unemployment rate rose from 5.4% to 5.5% even as the number of Unemployed workers rose by 125K to 8,674MM was due to the 397K influx into the civilian labor force which rose to 157.459MM, a new record high in the series, which on the surface would suggest declining slack as more people who have been traditionally left out of the employment calculation go back into the labor pool.Which aslo meant that since the total US civilian non-institutional population rose by half this number, the number of...

Every year since 2002, Minnesota has been losing residents to other states. What’s worse: Young adults are leaving in the greatest numbers. Casey Sperzel is Minnesotan through and through. She grew up in Maple Grove, went to college at the University of Minnesota, and lived in both St. Paul and Minneapolis. But when the 27-year-old met with a job recruiter last year, she was set on the Pacific Northwest. “I don’t think I’ll be back,” said Sperzel, now with a Seattle ad agency. States are scrambling for young professionals like Sperzel to help offset the wave of baby boomer retirements....

The number of Americans 16 years and older who did not participate in the labor force—meaning they neither had a job nor actively sought one in the last four weeks—rose from 92,898,000 in February to 93,175,000 in March, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is the first time the number of Americans out of the labor force has exceeded 93 million. Also from February to March, the labor force participation rate dropped from 62.8 percent to 62.7 percent, matching a 37-year low. Five times in the last twelve months, the participation rate has been...