Free Republic

Last Friday, a new regulation was proposed by the Obama administration that will make it harder and more expensive for employers to hire and promote white males, enrich class action lawyers, and do absolutely nothing to accomplish the ostensible goal of raising the pay of women relative to men.

This will make your blood boil. Federal employees with the Park Service brag about how they swindled two World War II veterans off the land for pennies on the dollar. Federal employees revel in the fact that they swindle land from private property owners at pennies on the dollar, in astonishing admissions captured in a recently released video. “We went out to the mine and the owners were two little guys that had been in the Second World War,” a California park service employee recalls at a retirement celebration for Mojave National Preserve Superintendent Mary Martin in 2005. The employee...

To fire a government employee, all you need is the will and the skill. This may sound simplistic given all the protections granted to civil servants and the complexities of federal human resources case law, but it’s true. What does it mean to have the will? It means having the strength to remove a poor employee when it is the right thing to do.

The owner of a fast food restaurant in Austin, Texas shocked his 50 employees by paying their full salaries during a five-month period when the business shut down. Jeff Glover, who has operated the Chick-fil-A for 15 years, wanted to remodel the building to accommodate more customers, but didn’t want to hurt his workers. So he continued paying them for the full five months. The restaurant, which reopened this week at West Braker Lane and U.S. 183, is now the largest Chick-fil-A in Austin–and surely the chicken retailer with the biggest heart.

According to a report issued by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the IRS allowed 960 out of 1,580 employees—or 61 percent—who willfully cheated on their taxes to continue working there after the misconduct was discovered. Most employees received less penalties such as counseling, reprimands, or suspensions. […] The report further stated that it could discern no consistent pattern to explain why certain employees had their penalties mitigated, while some were repeat offenders. …

Part-time Staples workers are furious that they could be fired for working more than 25 hours a week. The company implemented the policy to avoid paying benefits under the Affordable Care Act, reports Sapna Maheshwari at Buzzfeed. The healthcare law mandates that workers with more than 30 hours a week receive healthcare. If Staples doesn´t offer benefits, it could be fined $3,000 in penalties per person. Buzzfeed spoke with several Staples workers who revealed their hours have been drastically cut over the past year. Many reported working as few as 20 hours. The workers started a petition on Change.org asking

Now thanks to implanted RFID chips the size of a rice grain, employees who work at a new high-tech office campus in Sweden called Epicenter can wave their hands to open doors and operate machinery like Jedi masters using the Force. "We want to be able to understand this technology before big corporates and big governments come to us and say everyone should get chipped -- the tax authority chip, the Google or Facebook chip," Sjoblad told the BBC.

Chipotle employees greeted a group of officers at the restaurant with a “hands up, don’t shoot” protest. The New York police officers left without ordering. Via Weasel Zippers:A Chipotle representative responded to the incident. They took appropriate action against the employee involved. On Dec. 16, a group of eight NY police officers came to one our Brooklyn restaurants at about 6:15 PM, and before approaching the counter saw a single Chipotle employee raise her hands in what appears to have been a spontaneous, unplanned gesture of protest directed at the police. The group of officers then left without ordering food....

"Employee's Demotion for Comparing Media and Political Reaction to Trayvon Martin's Death to Lack of Response Over Shooting of a White Baby Upheld. Decision Highlights Troubling Aspects of Potential Government Overreach in "Hostile Work Environment" Law” Washington DC - In response to a recently-announced North Carolina administrative decision upholding an employee's demotion for comments about race, and in light of the calls for increased racial dialogue following Michael Brown's death in Ferguson, Missouri, the National Center's in-house legal scholar is warning American workers that local and federal government leaders may soon restrict racial and political speech even in private work...

Last Friday, for the first time in nearly a decade, Minnesota's minimum wage went up. The first in a series of incremental hikes brought the wage floor from $6.15 to $8 per hour for relatively large companies, and from $5.25 to $6.50 for small ones. As you'd expect, some businesses aren't thrilled about that -- especially bars and restaurants, as the new law doesn't include a tip exception. But the Oasis Cafe in Stillwater is generating a stir for transparently including a "Min Wage Fee" on all customer checks:

Most employees believe they have no say when it comes to changes in the workplace that directly affect their jobs. Six out of ten corporate staff said they have little or no input in decisions which affect them personally at work, according to a recent survey by Strayer University and Ipsos. Those over 35 felt their opinions mattered less than those workers aged 18-34 - although perhaps that's just a healthy dose of cynicism that comes from spending longer on the corporate ladder.

WMBF in Myrtle Beach, SC, reported Wednesday on the growing trend of businesses hiring only part-time workers, due to an inability to afford Obamacare. This situation leaves workers without healthcare and without a full-time income or other benefits. Local staffing agencies say more small business are starting to hire more part time employees. Not because there is more full time work, but as WMBF reporter Mandy Noell found out, it's because they can't afford to have more full time employees. Obamacare places requirements for health care benefits that many small businesses just cannot afford to pay. As a result, they...

Initial Reaction On the surface, this appeared to be a very strong jobs report from both the household survey and establishment survey perspective. The establishment survey reported a gain of 288,000 jobs while the household survey sported a gain in employment of 407,000. In addition, May was revised up from +217,000 to + 224,000, and April revised up from +282,000 to +304,000. Digging deeper into the details, strength was entirely part-time (and then some). Voluntary part-time employment rose by a whopping 840,000 and involuntary part-time employment rose by 275,000. Compared to a total gain of employment of 407,000, the gain...

The state employees were disciplined for lying to get money through the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, an extension of food stamps available to poor residents who lost food or income in September 2011 after Hurricane Irene hit here as a tropical storm. While Larson said the law merits revisiting, other members of the state's congressional delegation weren't so forthcoming about their views on the state measure or the similar federal law that have left taxpayers in the dark about the conduct and punishment of state employees -- many of whom were fired but rehired after they appealed. U.S. Sens....

(CNSNews.com) -- The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has 59,297 employees – 17.3 percent out of 342,089 workers total -- that make $100,000 or more in yearly salary, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Among those employees, 18,709 of them earn a salary of $180,000 or more.An OPM database, FedScope, contains historical data on the federal civilian workforce going back to 1998. The database holds information about civilian federal workers employed by most Executive Branch agencies (excluding intelligence agencies, the White House, and the Office of the Vice President) and some Legislative Branch agencies. It does...

President Obama declared Thursday that 99 percent of federal employees are not boneheads. "Are there some federal workers who do some boneheaded things? Absolutely,” Obama said at a town hall meeting in Minneapolis, Politico reported.  The president recalled something that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates told him: “One thing you should know, Mr. President, is that at any given moment on any given day, somebody in the federal government is screwing up.” That, said Obama, is "is true because there are 2 million employees … If 99 percent of the folks are doing the right thing and only 1 percent aren’t, that’s...

The worst kept secret is that employees are making less on average every year. There are millions of reasons for this, but we’re going to focus on one that we can control. Staying employed at the same company for over two years on average is going to make you earn less over your lifetime by about 50% or more. Keep in mind that 50% is a conservative number at the lowest end of the spectrum. This is assuming that your career is only going to last 10 years. The longer you work, the greater the difference will become over your...

Big Labor's VA Choke Hold How Democrats put their union allies before the well-being of veterans. By Kimberley A. Strassel May 29, 2014 We know with certainty that there is at least one person the Department of Veterans Affairs is serving well. That would be the president of local lodge 1798 of the National Federation of Federal Employees. The Federal Labor Relations Authority, the agency that mediates federal labor disputes, earlier this month ruled in favor of this union president, in a dispute over whether she need bother to show up at her workplace—the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Martinsburg,...

Just ten days after becoming CEO of web company Mozilla, Brendan Eich resigned after drawing the ire of LGBT advocates. In 2008, Eich donated money to the Proposition 8 campaign, an effort around legislation to make same-sex marriage illegal in California. When he was announced as the new Mozilla head, members of the LGBT community and even Mozilla employees expressed their dissatisfaction through social media and called for Eich’s resignation. Many have since spoken out against the backlash calling it unfair. On Monday’s “NewsOne Now,” Roland Martin was joined by a panel of guests to discuss the news, whether the...

Last Sunday, The New York Times published a front-page article about the heartfelt need of California farmers for more illegal aliens. The first tip-off that heinous public policy ideas were coming was that the Times introduced farmer Chuck Herrin, owner of a farm-labor contracting company, as a "lifelong Republican." That's Times-speak for "liberal." Herrin admitted that he employs a lot of illegal aliens and bitterly complained that they lived in fear of "Border Patrol and deportations." (But, apparently, he doesn't live in fear of admitting he's violating our immigration laws.) Sorry that running a country inconveniences you, Chuck. He said...