Free Republic

**SNIP** Many of his students who work to pay for their education and living expenses are complaining about being cut to 28 hours. “They’re saying they couldn’t pay their bills at 40 hours, so now they’re having to get a second job,” Diaz said. “That is the new trend.” But it’s not just restaurant workers and sales clerks who are feeling the squeeze. Universities and community colleges that rely heavily on part-time faculty have had to make the hard choice of cutting the number of classes they teach because the schools can’t afford to offer them health insurance.

Ninety-two million Americans are not in the work force—they don’t have jobs and they aren’t looking for jobs. These 92 million Americans aren’t just out of work—they are resigned to being out of work as a way of life. The ballooning numbers of Americans who are resigned to long-term joblessness inspired Roger L. Simon to suggest in a bleakly humorous piece over at PJ Media that Americans are going Galt: Tell all your “Objectivist” friends and the libertarian gang at Reason magazine to break out the champagne. Americans may have skipped the movie of Atlas Shrugged, nor have many read...

Recently, the media has been awash with articles suggesting that career women are to relationships what garlic is to a vampire - the kiss of death. We're unable to sustain meaningful unions, apparently, because men are intimidated by our intellect, threatened by our higher earning potential and turned off by our controlling, capable, yet powerful personalities. Two years ago I went to dinner with a doctor who told me that I 'wasn't in touch with my femininity' as I 'didn't flirt or wear much make-up'. His diagnosis also included the undeniable fact that I was in 'acute need of affection'....

The latest information on job creation doesn’t paint a very optimistic picture. We’ll start with the sunnier metric, the weekly initial jobless claims report, which shows the number of claims dropping back into the pre-holiday range: In the week ending January 4, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 330,000, a decrease of 15,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 345,000. The 4-week moving average was 349,000, a decrease of 9,750 from the previous week’s revised average of 358,750.The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.2 percent for the week ending December 28, unchanged from the...

<p>CHICAGO (AP) -- It's an assertion that has been accepted as fact by droves of the unemployed: Older people remaining on the job later in life are stealing jobs from young people.</p> <p>One problem, many economists say: It isn't supported by a wisp of fact.</p>

(snip) But no. The real reason? Young graduates don't have soft skills. A few years ago, they had a bunch of soft skills, but not anymore. White explains: Overwhelmingly, [employers] want candidates who are team players, problem solvers and can plan, organize and prioritize their work. Technical and computer-related know-how placed much further down the list. Jobs are going unfilled as a result, which hurts companies and employees. The annual global Talent Shortage Survey from ManpowerGroup finds that nearly 1 in 5 employers worldwide can’t fill positions because they can’t find people with soft skills. Specifically, companies say candidates are...

MADISON — Federal employees in Wisconsin apparently cannot have their cake and eat it, too. What could be more than 2,000 furloughed workers who received back pay related to the 16-day partial government shutdown will have to reimburse any unemployment benefits that were applied for or collected during that time, Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development spokesman John Dipko said. That total could be in excess of $245,000. According to Dipko, nearly 2,070 federal employees in the Badger State filed claims for unemployment between Sept. 30 and Oct. 12. The number of claims made last week were not available at the...

Last week, the Tea Party Immigration Coalition announced a boycott of several national restaurant chains, including McDonald's after they, along with more than 100 companies signed a letter asking the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a so-called 'comprehensive immigration reform' bill this year. Thus granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, as well as increasing the number of foreign workers coming to this country legally. Such a measure would undoubtedly displace more American workers, at a time when only 47 percent of Americans have a full time job. On Thursday, the TPIC sent a message to McDonald's explaining the...

Medieval doctors bled their patients with leeches. Far from improving their condition, it left them worse off. Raising the wages of fast-food workers to $15 an hour would produce similar results for those the proposal is intended to help. In America, minimum-wage workers are better paid than the average worker in Mexico. Why? It’s not because U.S. employers are more generous than their Mexican counterparts. Nor do Americans somehow deserve better pay. American minimum-wage earners make more because they produce more. Better education and greater capital investment make American workers more productive, raising their earnings. Competition forces businesses to pay...

College graduates are tending bar and driving taxis, pushing people without degrees out of those jobs.

SCOTLAND Yard wants to downgrade the importance of written English tests at police recruitment centres to make it easier for candidates from ethnic minorities to join the Met. Bosses believe people who do not have English as their first language are being discriminated against under current assessment rules. They have recommended the weighting placed on the “Written Communication” section of the Metropolitan Police’s tough entrance exam is lowered. However, they fear a “white backlash” among rank and file officers who feel they have already been passed over for promotion. Home Affairs Committee chairman, MP Keith Vaz, said last night any...

With the latest numbers out this week from the Bureau of Labor Statistics stating that over 90 million people are out of the work force, I would say that the White House is well on its way to fulfilling its Cloward and Piven dream. One of the main objectives to lead us down the path to a “socialist utopia” is to collapse the welfare system, cause a crisis and then have the government come in and change us into a communist republic.  Yes, I said it. Over the past five years, Barak Obama has “fundamentally transformed America” and we have...

FULL TITLE: Workers believe Gen Y bosses aren’t team players, act like they are entitled and are full of themselves, survey finds The workers of Generation Y are getting a name for themselves. Managers from Gen Y are widely perceived as self-entitled and don’t score particularly highly when it comes to being a team player. Generation Y is defined as people aged between 18 and 32. It finds that they’re moving into management at a rapid pace. New newly released research from EY, the global firm that includes Ernst & Young LLP suggests 87 percent of Gen Y managers have...

As a former fast-food worker, I can attest to the crazy hours, poor working conditions and rotten pay. I boiled chicken — and repeatedly burned my forearms — in hot pressure cookers in high school for Colonel Sanders’s KFC (now owned by YUM Brands) until I could get a higher-paying job in a department store. The unionized retail clerk’s job wasn’t glamorous, either, but it was a big step up: I sold sporting goods, rang a register (calculating change in my head) and hand-drilled bowling balls. Although the pioneering retail chain (E.J. Korvette’s) at the time was dying a slow...

The June JOLTS report, the job openings measure, was expected to print at 3,895,000. It printed at 3,936,000 after a revised print in May of 3,907,000. We are back to the recession job openings level of 2008, but going up instead of down. jolts0806213 That is the highest level in 5 years! Now for the bad news. Bill Gross at PIMCO thinks that the JOLTS print does not equate to 200,000 jobs. More like 125,000. grossjobstweet From Zero Hedge, we get this charming chart. JOLTS June 3 If we look at The House Ways and Means study on job creation...

In the recent fury over a proposed budget for low-wage workers circulated by McDonald’s, Forbes contributor Laura Shin asked “Will the McDonald’s Employee Budget help Get the Minimum Wage Raised?” I hope not, but not just for the sake of McDonald’s customers and shareholders. I hope not for the sake of McDonald’s workers and for the sake of low-wage workers everywhere.Who could possibly be so heartless? That’s the wrong question. I agree that we should be soft-hearted, but to borrow from Princeton economist Alan Blinder, our soft hearts have to be combined with hard heads. While Blinder was one of...

The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a current unemployment rate of around 9%. So how is it with roughly 12.8 million people out of work, there are still so many jobs going unfilled? A recent report by Deloitte for the Manufacturing Institute which was based on a survey of manufacturers, found that as many as 600,000 jobs are going unfilled. “High unemployment is not making it easier to fill positions, particularly in the areas of skilled production and production support,” the Deloitte report found. There is a growing talent gap between skilled jobs in the trades and trained...

We’re witnessing the continuation of a long trend. Girls overtook boys for school exam performance in the 1980s and outnumbered them in universities in the 1990s. There is no reason why the progress should stop at equality: in field after field, women are starting to dominate. In the recession, four out of five British jobs lost were held by men. … And there is, of course, no discrimination. The economy is changing shape in a way that is to men’s collective disadvantage. Occupations requiring physical strength are rapidly disappearing; a quarter of manufacturing jobs have vanished in the past 10...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court says people must be able to hire and fire people to be considered a supervisor in a discrimination lawsuit.

Do 20- and 30-somethings prefer a womb-to-tomb quasi-communist corporate culture like Japan, or do they prefer a less secure, more competitive, corporate culture of modern America? There was a time when Americans worked for a ...