The President’s attention in his proposed budget to the challenges faced by unemployed young workers is encouraging. His proposal for a “Pathways Back to Work Fund” would make $12.5 billion available to create and/or subsidize jobs for younger as well as older unemployed workers.
It’s been a good week for the 23,000 people who work for one U.S. retail chain. Even as the national economy continued to plod along and the unemployment rate remained disturbingly high, Hobby Lobby announced it is upping its minimum hourly wage to $14 for full-time employees and $9.50 for part-time workers.
After a bruising election in which their standard-bearer became a symbol of wealth and privilege, Republicans are emerging as born-again champions of the common people. The latest proposal in the House, the “Working Families Flexibility Act,” is billed as a pro-worker proposal that will let mom bank comp time so she can take a family vacation later. But for such a worker-friendly idea, the bill has attracted support from strange quarters.
Like many New Yorkers, Hazel B. of Queens struggled to get by after she was laid off from her job as an accounts receivable administrator. A single mother of two, Hazel relied on credit cards to make ends meet while she looked for work.
Finally, she found a job opening that looked promising. She went on two interviews and took a test given by the potential employer. She believed she had performed well, but then word came back that Hazel would not be hired because of negative information in her credit report.
Once you get your hard-earned dollars into your 401(k), it’s painful to think they might not begetting you the highest return possible. Before you go any further, those who aren’t contributing regularly to a 401(k) or another type of tax-advantaged retirement account, such as a Traditional or Roth IRA, need to start now. While making that 10 or 15 percent contribution from your paycheck can be tough, there’s no excuse to not plan for supporting yourself in your old age.
An influential state lawmaker in North Carolina is launching an effort to make it harder for his state’s citizens to vote. It’s a development that should trouble voters, especially because North Carolina’s election process has been improving lately.
An influential state lawmaker in North Carolina is launching an effort to make it harder for his state’s citizens to vote. It’s a development that should trouble voters, especially because North Carolina’s election process has been improving lately.
Nowadays, whenever Social Security comes up in policy debates around Washington, the discussion often focuses on how best to cut benefits in order to shore up the program’s finances.
The company an employee works for makes all the difference. Over the course of a 40-year career, workers at some companies lose tens of thousands of dollars in 401(k) fees and earnings -- sometimes more than double the savings lost by workers at other firms, according to an exclusive analysis of about 2,300 company 401(k) plans by FutureAdvisor, an online financial adviser.
When Vernardo and Claire Simmons-Valenzuela married, they imagined all the trappings of a middle-class life. Soon enough, they had kids. Claire finished a master's degree. They held jobs as an Army medic and a physician's assistant. They dreamed of next steps: owning a home, taking their first vacation in years. Vernardo would return to school for a bachelor’s in nursing. But when payments for the couple's $187,000 in combined student loan debt came due, most of it accrued during Claire’s graduate education, they put those dreams on hold.
The push for Same Day Registration has encountered a curious adversary in some states this year – county clerks.
The latest example is Utah, where the state Senate killed a SDR bill last week on an 18-10 vote. Under current state law, Utahans must register at least 15 days before an election if they want their ballot to be counted. Since many voters don’t tune in until the waning days of a campaign, arbitrary deadlines like this come as an unwelcome surprise to a lot of people who hope to participate in elections.
When it comes to Election Day, Minnesota and Montana are very different animals. Despite its size, most of Minnesota’s increasingly diverse population resides in the state’s major cities, while three-quarters of Montana voters live in a county with fewer than 100,000 residents. And while Montana is solidly red in presidential elections, Minnesota hasn’t thrown its weight behind a Republican since Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972.
It’s too late for Tonisha Howard, the mother of three in Milwaukee who was fired for leaving work to be with her hospitalized two-year-old. And forFelix Trinidad, who was so afraid of losing his job at Golden Farm fruit store in Brooklyn that he didn’t take time off to go to the doctor—even after he vomited blood.
When Barack Obama won a second term in the White House in November 2012, many observers concluded that new voting ID laws hadn't had much effect on turnout. After all, the election had swung in Democrats’ favor, and young and minority voters comprised a larger share of the electorate than four years earlier. So identification requirements aren’t the threat to voting rights that many feared, right?
More data from the 2012 election is in, and it’s tough to deny that the health of democracy and safety of your voting rights vary widely depending on where you live.
That finding comes through clearly in a new report from Nonprofit VOTE, a nonpartisan group that encourages nonprofits to engage voters. The report parses the latest data on the 2012 elections, and it should be required reading for the legion of state lawmakers considering changes to election laws this year.
Proposals to raise the minimum wage are enormously popular with the American public, but there’s a reason they are successful only on occasion.
The powerful business lobby is quite effective at getting through to lawmakers with their message that higher wage requirements will lead to less employment. That’s a particularly potent argument in today’s environment, after four years of elevated unemployment levels.