Posts tagged Bureau of Labor and Statistics
Federal and State Leaders Take Aim at Empowering America’s Flexible Workforce
July 16, 2025 // However, while federal leaders build support for national reforms to help workers all across America, states are not sitting idle. They know that not only do self-employed workers support greater access to portable benefits, but their residents in general think this warrants policy reforms as well. Instead, many are forging ahead with legal pathways for flexible, portable benefits, maximizing what they can do at the state level in ways that will be further enhanced by federal reforms when they occur. Many states introduced legislation this year to legalize voluntary benefits, but several pioneering states now have laws enacted.
Op-ed: New Economic Study Finds California’s $20 Fast Food Minimum Wage Caused 18,000 Job Losses
July 16, 2025 // As the Globe warned, thousands of fast food employees lost jobs, employees’ hours were cut, and business owners had to do more with less. The data comes just over one year after AB 1228’s implementation, and as Los Angeles considers a drastic union-backed $30 wage hike for hotel and tourism workers that would follow the fast food wage law’s precedent of economic destruction, EPI reports.
Bid Protests Offer a Way Around PLAs, But Will a Slow, Steady Precedent Win the Day?
June 25, 2025 // The OMB memo instructs federal agencies to maintain the labor pact requirements but also points to a Federal Acquisition Rule provision that provides an exception to the PLA requirement for large construction projects when its use would substantially reduce the number of bidders and impact the price. But it has left neither contractor groups nor NABTU happy. "To that extent this isn’t what we hoped for, it is definitely better than what was in place with the Biden administration,” Brian Turmail, vice president of public affairs and workforce at AGC told ENR. “In addition, given the recent court decisions, it is hard to see how the administration will be able to impose a mandated PLA without facing successful bid protests."
5.9% of Washington Workers Are Union Members, 6th Most in the U.S.
June 9, 2025 // Union membership in the United States has declined to its lowest point in decades. In 1979, unions represented 24.1% of the American workforce. By 2024, that share had fallen to just 9.9%, according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and UnionStats. In absolute terms, this represents a drop of roughly 6.7 million members—from a peak of 20.9 million in 1979 to around 14.2 million in 2024.
TCGPlayer Announces Plans to Relocate Authentication Operations from Syracuse to Kentucky
May 30, 2025 // According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, in 2024 New York State had 1.7M union members, representing 20.6% of the state’s 8M+ employees. Kentucky only has 156,000 union members out of 1.7M employees, representing just under 9% of their labor force. The minimum wage in New York is $16.50 per hour and will go up to $17 an hour in 2026. In 2027 it will continue to grow in accordance with the Consumer Price Index. The minimum wage in Kentucky is $7.25 per hour, the same as the Federal minimum wage, and has not changed since 2009.
Why unions won’t be participating in the U.S. manufacturing boom
May 27, 2025 // "Unionization policy in the United States is based on an adversarial relationship between management and labor," James Hohman, director of fiscal policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, told Newsweek. "This means that the unions are not looked at as an asset to improve production; they are looked at as an extra cost and extra liability—which is why we see often, but not exclusively, U.S. states with less union concentration are the ones who are adding more employment.
Kim Kavin: The Tangled Web
May 23, 2025 // I know how most writers’ minds work. I have a well-honed instinct for spotting a thread I should pull on because the facts might be tangled up in some kind of web. This hyperlink in Newsweek was a different kind of typo. The words “2020 analysis” actually did lead to a report about independent contractors—one that was written not in 2020, but instead in 2009. A wrong hyperlink of that nature is a red flag to any decent editor that there’s probably an association in the writer’s mind between the words in the hyperlink and where that link goes. Any experienced editor will pull on that thread to figure out if there’s an actual problem with the facts.
Op-ed: Trump is neutering the Labor Department
April 12, 2025 // For union president Aliyah Levin, executive vice president Rob Sax and vice president Omar Algeciras, this moment is not just about protecting jobs but about protecting the mission of the department and, by extension, the public. At the core of the union leaders’ concerns is the Trump administration’s clear hostility toward federal civil servants. As Levin put it bluntly, “What is wrong with this administration that they’ve made public servants the enemy?”
Free the Economy podcast with Vinnie Vernuccio of the Institute for the American Worker
March 27, 2025 // Our interview for Episode 116 of the Free the Economy podcast is with Vinnie Vernuccio of the Institute for the American Worker. We talk about labor unions, independent contractors, right-to-work laws, port automation, and the future of the American workforce. Free the Economy is hosted by Richard Morrison. Our co-producer and editor is Destry Edwards. Keep up with new episodes by following us on Twitter at @freethe_economy and read our episode summaries, with links to the stories we cover, at cei.org/blog.
Michigan Republican presses Chavez-DeRemer to rescind Biden-era labor regulations
March 20, 2025 // “I encourage DOL to enforce its laws while providing robust compliance assistance to workers and businesses instead of continuing the enforcement-only approach taken by the Biden-Harris administration,” Walberg said Wednesday to Chavez-DeRemer in a letter shared with The Hill.