Last week I wrote a long exegesis on microtasking and the future of temporary, remote workers. I only dabbled in microtasking on Amazon's Mechanical Turk exchange, but reader D. Bush uses it often and writes in about her experience:
For 280 consecutive months before President Obama took office — a span of more than 23 years — the portion of Americans who were employed always exceeded 60.0 percent (according to official tallies from the Bureau of Labor Statistics). In marked contrast, last Friday’s jobs numbers show that, under Obama, the portion of Americans who are employed has remained below 60.0 percent for 40 consecutive months.
A surrogate for President Obama's reelection campaign, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a member of the president's cabinet, says that "we've turned the corner" on the economy:
The Republican National Committee has released this web ad, which hits President Obama--because, under his leadership, "Hispanics are left suffering disproportionately under his economic policies," according to an RNC press release.
President Obama, speaking this afternoon in Cleveland, seemed to celebrate the unemployment rate of 8.1 percent, and said it "typically take[s] countries up to ten years to recover from financial crises of this magnitude."
At this point in 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was running for reelection, the Yankees’ 24-year-old Mickey Mantle was on his way to winning the Triple Crown, 37-year-old Jackie Robinson was playing in his final season in the big leagues (eventually helping Brooklyn edge the Milwaukee Braves by 1 game for the pennant), 21-year-old Elvis Presley had just performed “Hound Dog” on The Milton Berle Show, and 57.6 percent of Americans were employed.
Everybody is worried about the nation’s dismal employment situation, and that worry has prompted news organizations, pundits, market watchers, and others to focus intently upon any and all economic metrics that gauge the problem. On the first Friday of every month, the non-farm payroll report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is hotly anticipated, and can move the markets for days afterwards.
The federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes monthly tallies for the employment-population ratio. That stat shows something rather straightforward: Among those who are living in America and are free to pursue employment, what percentage are employed? (The bureau excludes those who are under 16 years old, are active-duty military, or are — in the bure
John Merline of Investor's Business Daily interviews Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot. Marcus tells IBD that Home Depot "would never have succeeded" as a retail business if it were founded today because of the regulatory burden. Here's a taste of the interview:
For the last year or two, USA Today has really been doing some terrific analysis on the federal workforce, and as you might expect, much of what they've discovered is pretty damning. The latest:
Federal employees' job security is so great that workers in many agencies are more likely to die of natural causes than get laid off or fired, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
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