Free Republic

There’s this iconic scene in the 1984 “Footloose” where Kevin Bacon’s city-boy character Ren McCormack goes head-to-head with his macho antagonist Chuck Cranston to show who’s the bigger man in a game of “chicken.”The two young men mount tractors on opposite ends of a single-lane road facing each other and drive full speed ahead to see who flinches first. In this hazardous game, one of them must swerve off the path, or both could die in the head-on collision — but the first one to swerve will be dubbed the “chicken” for his cowardice. After Ren’s shoelace gets caught on...

Update (1800ET): Southwest Airlines has had another terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day - as a shortage of workers combined with an air traffic control interruption to bring the total number of canceled flights to nearly 3,100 in four days."Crews were struggling to move and you end up in short order with aircraft and crews in the wrong spot," said EVP Bob Jordan, adding "It’s really difficult to repair and put those things back together."Speculation over the actual cause of the cancellations has been rampant on social media - with some pilots refuting claims that they were staging a...

It's time to sell the business and retire — but that's easier said than done.Gary and Judi Eubanks are one of a kind. Both in their 60s, Judi is a skilled pianist and Gary can often be found playing pick-up basketball with the young people he used to coach. They have two sons and a handful of grandkids, and they’re heavily involved in their local church, where Judi is one of the piano players and Gary is almost always either leading worship or fixing the heating or air conditioning. That’s because the duo also owns All Temperature Systems, a heating,...

Supply chain problems continue to plague the restaurant industry, leading big chains Taco Bell and Starbucks to warn consumers on Monday that some items may not be available. Starbucks told customers on its app that “due to supply shortages, some items are temporarily unavailable.” That echoed warnings that have persisted at the chain’s locations for months. Consumers have complained on social media channels about periodic shortages of items such as green tea. At Taco Bell, customers are complaining about a lack of hot sauce. The Mexican fast-food chain’s website warns customers that not all items are available at the moment....

The great conundrum of the U.S. economy today is that we have record numbers of working age people out of the labor ‎force at the same time we have businesses desperately trying to find workers. As an example, the American Transportation Research Institute estimates there are 30,000 – 35,000 trucker jobs that could be filled tomorrow if workers would take these jobs–a shortage that could rise to 240,000 by 2022. While the jobs market overall remains weak, demand is high for in certain sectors. For skilled and reliable mechanics, welders, engineers, electricians, plumbers, computer technicians, and nurses, jobs are plentiful;...

America has a deficit of workers. Willing workers. Capable workers. Skilled, or at least semi-skilled workers, who can do a job and do it well. There are at least one million jobs that go begging day after day if only employers could find workers to fill them. This probably seems hard-to-believe. After all, how can America have a worker shortage when we have about 18 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed? When the real unemployment rate is 12 percent? Well certainly the economy isn’t creating nearly as many jobs as it should – in large part because of regulatory...

A shortage of at least 500,000 poll workers nationwide means many voters could face long lines, cranky volunteers, polling places that don't open or close on schedule and the chance that results won't be known until long after the polls are closed. Roughly 1.4 million people have been trained to serve as poll workers on Tuesday, about the same as four years ago, according to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. But nearly 2 million will be needed to deal with expected heavy turnout, huge numbers of first-time voters and unfamiliar touch-screen machines in hundreds of counties. Desperate for workers, the...

2. THE KAHUNA'S RANT O' THE WEEK: Blinding Flashes of the Obvious -- By Tobin Smith OK, it’s blinding flash of the obvious time. Sometimes I think investors get so caught up with the BIG questions about the market and their stocks that they miss the HUGE transformational changes (i.e. opportunities and dangers) occurring every day right in front of them. I start this session with perhaps the most obvious: skilled labor in this country is NOT in surplus, but in short supply. I refer to today’s Washington Post Business section story on employers’ lament about the “declining ranks of...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - NASA (news - web sites)'s efforts to return its aging space shuttles to flight will siphon so many workers away from operations to work on safety that the program could be plagued by a worker shortage in the future, an oversight group warned on Wednesday. Since the fatal Columbia crash in 2003, NASA has created three new departments focused on safety and engineering, making them independent of the shuttle program and its concerns about budget and on-time flights. But those new departments are being staffed by workers drawn from other shuttle operations who are not...