flickr/incendiarymindOver the past three decades in the U.S., income from labor (wages, salaries, pensions, etc.) has been declining even as capital income (interest, dividends, investment returns, etc.) accounts for a greater share of total…
Worker productivity is among the most critical measurements used when evaluating businesses and national economies. One way to measure productivity is sales per employee. Companies that can achieve the highest revenue with fewest employees…
Toys”R”Us will add 45,000 temporary jobs for the holidays. As retailers usually announce, some of these people may get full-time jobs. Of course, most will not. If consumers continue to be worried about the…
From October through December last year, U.S. retail payrolls added 660,200 workers according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That was barely more than the 647,600 seasonal workers added in 2010. For 2012,…
Chinese state media reported Monday on a mass brawl among up to 2,000 workers at a Foxconn plant in Taiyuan, in Shanxi province. Foxconn’s Taiwanese parent company Hon Hai said in a statement that…
Why does the stock market keep rising? Apparent reasons for it to do so have begun to disappear. The S&P 500 and NYSE sit at multiyear highs, though the NASDAQ remains well below its 2000…
Breaking with its past practice, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (NYSE: WMT) said today that it plans to hire about 50,000 seasonal workers and to boost hours for its regular employees during the 2012 holiday season.…
The United States is becoming a one of the lower-cost manufacturing centers in the world, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Low labor and energy costs are expected to…
The U.S. Labor Department has released the latest report of weekly jobless claims. After the claims had been trending in the wrong direction in prior weeks, this preliminary claims report came out at 382,000.…
The math is very crude. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bank of America Corp. (NYSE: BAC), still desperate to turn itself around, will fire 16,000 people this year. Compare that to the 100,000 jobs…
In 2010, U.S. firms hired an estimated 627,000 temporary workers to help meet demand for customer service, package handling and warehousing. Of that total, about 495,000 were hired in retail stores. Last year’s total…
Coal miner Alpha Natural Resources Inc. (NYSE: ANR) announced today that it was “idling” eight mines in Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania and eliminating about 400 jobs in an effort to reduce costs as…
Gallup released a poll that shows what almost everyone already knows. More than 60% of people with college educations and who are between 25 and 52 years old have jobs — specifically “full-time jobs…
A person who graduated from Dartmouth last year was expected to make $51,600 in his or her first job. It makes sense. Dartmouth is an Ivy League school that graduates the best of the best students.…
The most recent Gallup unemployment survey reported that the unadjusted U.S. unemployment rate in mid-September fell from 8.1% in August to 7.9%. The polling firm’s seasonally adjusted rate remained flat at 8.1%. If the…