News
WSJ | Workers Try a New Tactic in Minimum-Wage Fight
Fast-food workers have held rallies asking for hourly pay starting at $15. President Barack Obama is publicly praising companies—from retailer Gap Inc. to Punch Neapolitan Pizza, a tiny Minnesota pizza joint—that committed to paying workers more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
Blogs
WSJ | Fed’s Dudley: Notable Part of Labor Force Drop Due to Discouraged Workers
Federal Reserve Bank of New York President William Dudley said Wednesday that around “a couple of percentage points” of the nation’s decline in the labor force participation rate is tied to discouraged workers exiting the workforce.
WSJ | Government Jobs: Slow Hiring + More Retirements = Tepid Recovery
A new survey of human resource managers sheds some light on why state and local government employment five years after the recession continues to mostly miss the rebound. The Center for State & Local Government Excellence surveyed 300 managers mostly in charge of hiring for non-education positions, finding two-thirds hired new employees in 2013 and more than half said they hired more people last year than in 2012.
CATO | Is There a STEM Worker “Shortage”?
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a new report claiming that there is no STEM worker “shortage”* after looking at the small wage gains in STEM occupations since 2000. CIS has a history of using poor methodology and data in their reports, but assuming that they did everything correctly this time, their results don’t tell us much for two reasons.
