Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 312,000 in December, and the unemployment rate rose to 3.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, food services and drinking places, construction, manufacturing, and retail trade. Household Survey Data The unemployment rate rose by 0.2 percentage point to 3.9 percent … Continue reading
For several decades now, the employment rate among prime-age U.S adults has been falling. Less-educated males have experienced the largest drop in employment, but the troubling trends in participation are not limited to this group. Employment rates among women, which had been rising since the late 1960s, have stagnated and in some recent years declined. … Continue reading
The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 for a decade, but many states have a higher rate and some wage hikes will take effect this year. We’ve rounded up the latest news on what employers need to know for 2019. Here are SHRM Online resources and news articles from other trusted media outlets. Nineteen states increased their … Continue reading
The big picture: There were 12.8 million manufacturing jobs as of October, up from the 11.4 million in March 2010, the nadir of the financial crash, according to the St. Louis Fed. But they are still a shadow of their modern 19.4 million-job peak in 1979, and right about where they were in October 1941, … Continue reading
The number of refugees resettled in the U.S. decreased more than in any other country in 2017. That year the U.S. resettled 33,000 refugees, the lowest total since the two years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and a steep drop from 2016. Non-U.S. countries resettled more than twice as many refugees as the … Continue reading
Consider two high school seniors — one who exhibits strong academic talent and one who does not… To whom does our education system owe what? After high school graduation, the first student can access more than $10,000 annually in public funds to support his college experience. Federal funding for higher education has grown by 133 … Continue reading
Nearly 36 percent of women born in the years 1980–84 had earned a bachelor’s degree by age 31, compared with 28 percent of men. Among both women and men, 38 percent had attended some college or earned an associate degree by age 31. Twenty-four percent had earned a high school diploma or General Educational Development … Continue reading
Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 155,000 in November, and the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 3.7 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care, in manufacturing, and in transportation and warehousing. Household Survey Data In November, the unemployment rate was 3.7 percent for the third month in … Continue reading
Apprenticeship programs, when implemented effectively, provide workers with a career path featuring paid on-the-job training, skills development, and mentorship, while at the same time providing employers with a steady source of highly trained and productive workers. These programs have the potential to grow into a critical and successful component of America’s workforce strategy, but are … Continue reading
Employers continue to endorse broad learning as essential to long-term career success. When hiring, executives and hiring managers place a high priority on graduates’ demonstrated proficiency in skills and knowledge that cut across majors, and hiring managers are closely aligned with executives in the importance that they place on key college learning outcomes. As noted … Continue reading
The number of unauthorized immigrants living in the United States was lower in 2016 than at any time since 2004. This decline is due mainly to a large drop in the number of new unauthorized immigrants, especially Mexicans, coming into the country. The origin countries of unauthorized immigrants also shifted during that time, with the … Continue reading
This report tracks annual hours worked by prime-age adults by gender, race, ethnicity, wage level, and family structure. The trends across so many different groups are hard to summarize briefly, but one particular pattern stands out: workers seem to be increasingly separating into two groups: prime-age adults who are falling out of, or never get … Continue reading
The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 43.7 million in 2016. Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Immigrants today account for 13.5% of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share (4.7%) in 1970. However, today’s immigrant share remains … Continue reading
Today, the federal government spends $18 billion for on-the-job training to help workers secure the skills and training they need to access in-demand, well-paying jobs. That number is dwarfed by the estimated $600 billion a year that employers spend on formal and informal training. Employers clearly are committed to investing in their workers. The question … Continue reading
How much do demographic changes affect the overall LFP rate trend? To quantify how much of the decline in the aggregate LFP rate is driven by changes in the composition of the population, we construct two hypothetical aggregate LFP rate scenarios. In this approach, we use Current Population Survey (CPS) microdata from the Bureau for … Continue reading