Posts tagged Employment
Littler Lightbulb – March 2026 Employment Appellate Roundup
April 21, 2026 // This Littler Lightbulb highlights some of the more significant employment and labor law developments in the federal courts of appeal in the last month.
What a possible $25 D.C. minimum wage could mean for the region’s restaurant industry
March 11, 2026 // In D.C., Clower believes a significantly higher minimum wage would have a “net negative impact on employment.” He pointed to factors like federal worker and contractor reductions, immigration actions and waning tourism already hitting the restaurant and hospitality industries hard. “All of these other things have been hitting particularly restaurants and some of the other hospitality sectors who on average pay minimum wage already, and this is just going to be something else that will drive some of them out of business,”
UPS Is the Symptom, Not the Disease: How Labor Policy Shapes Long-Run Worker Outcomes
February 18, 2026 // The question, then, is not whether the gains are real, but how the trade-offs unfold. Why do headline-grabbing contracts so often coincide with downsizing, automation, and job losses in sectors governed by exclusive, monopoly bargaining arrangements? When short-run wage gains are secured through monopoly bargaining power, where do the adjustments occur—and who ultimately bears the costs?
Where the Jobs Are (and Aren’t): Sectoral Shifts and the Federal Workforce Pullback
November 5, 2025 // Healthcare’s steady expansion and manufacturing’s contraction capture the reallocation story at the heart of today’s labor market. Where jobs grow—and where they disappear—helps explain why some young workers thrive while others stall. Meanwhile, the federal workforce reductions mark one of the most significant government pullbacks in decades, echoing the reform-minded cuts of the 1990s.
Protect Worker Freedom to Best Help Black Women, All Workers
August 21, 2025 // The removal of DEI positions and programming under the second Trump Administration is also credited with having a disparate impact on Black women. This argument might sound reasonable to regular people, but data doesn’t prove it. Black women are overrepresented in federal jobs compared to private sector employment. They comprise 6.6% of the civilian workforce but 12.1% of the federal workforce, the largest differential among racial demographics.
Do More Powerful Unions Generate Better Pro-Worker Outcomes?
May 15, 2025 // Unionization is generally associated with higher wages for lower-skilled unionized workers.[37] However, when unionized sectors set higher wages, excess workers shift to nonunionized sectors, increasing the labor supply and lowering wages for lower-skilled nonunion workers.
Liya Palagashvili: The Portable Benefits Revolution: How Did We Get Here?
May 1, 2025 // Senator Bill Cassidy just put flexible benefits on the map. This is the story of how a niche policy idea climbed to the top of the Congressional agenda.
Labor Department workers fear they’re next on DOGE’s to-do list
February 6, 2025 // he suit came just before representatives of DOGE met with Labor Department officials, prompting an outcry from lawmakers and labor groups who staged a demonstration outside the Frances Perkins Building in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday afternoon. “They want us to think that DOL is some bureaucracy that doesn’t matter, that could not be further from the truth,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said at the rally, speaking to several hundred union members and supporters. “This is about our health, our safety, our fair pay, our jobs, and these are the people who fight for us.”
The Changes Begin: Trump Administration Takes Slew of Actions in the Labor and Employment Field
January 28, 2025 // President Trump did not take immediate action to fire the General Counsels for the EEOC and NLRB, moves that had been widely anticipated for his first day in office, although those actions are expected soon. Once made, the moves will further shift those agencies away from their Biden-era policies toward, to some extent, more business-friendly approaches with some significant caveats evident in the President’s initial Executive Orders.
Commentary: More Jobs, Fewer Workers: Is the Labor Market Strong or Weak?
November 5, 2024 // Even after factoring in the BLS’s acknowledgment that its reports overstated job gains by 818,000 from March 2023 to March 2024, there still appears to be about five times as many new jobs created over the past year as there are additional people working. While media reports and markets tend to focus on jobs reports, what matters most to the economy and to human flourishing is how many people are working. Currently only 60.2% of people ages 16 and over in the U.S. are working. This is a gap of about 2.6 million workers compared to pre-pandemic employment rates.