Most states are still more than two years away from returning to prerecession employment levels, according to a new analysis.

Only four states — Alaska, North Dakota, Texas, and Louisiana — have created enough jobs since the recovery to get back to where they were prior to the recession, according to economist Steven Frable of IHS Global Insight . All four of those states have benefited from an energy boom, and Louisiana was starting at a low level of employment after taking a major hit from Hurricane Katrina.

Two more states, New York and West Virginia, are expected to return to their prerecession peak later this year, and 10 more should reach the mark next year. But the majority of states still won’t get there until after 2014. Meanwhile, returning to peak employment levels doesn’t necessarily mean jobs markets are healed. In fact, getting back to where a state started doesn’t account for the jobs needed by new entrants to the labor force over the past four years.

Eighteen states still are more than 5% below their 2007 employment levels, and the two worst-hit states — Nevada and Michigan — are still more than 10% off their peaks. Frable estimates those two states, as well as Rhode Island which has seen sluggish job growth, won’t return to prerecession peaks until sometime after 2017.

Labor Department figures indicate that the percentage of workers over the traditional retirement age of 65 is at a record high. But, the figures show, job totals fell sharply for men under 55 during the recession and have only started to recover, while the proportion of women ages 25 to 54 with jobs also slid and is close to the lowest level of the last two decades.

“The fact of the matter is that this aging-but-not-yet-aged segment of the baby boomer class can’t afford to retire,” said David A. Rosenberg, the chief economist of Gluskin Sheff, a Canadian firm, noting that overall household net worth was 15 percent lower than at the prerecession peak. “Dreams of the 5,000-square-foot McMansion being a viable retirement asset have morphed into nightmares of a deflationary ball and chain.”

The accompanying charts show the percentage of various age groups with jobs since the end of 2006, when the overall percentage of people with jobs hit its cyclical peak. Each of the charts has a different range, but the same spread between the top and the bottom, so that a move of a given size represents the same gain or loss in percentage points.

For the first time since the government began keeping track of the numbers in 1981 — and probably the first time ever — one in nine American men over the age of 75 was working in April. About one in 20 women over that age have jobs.

Crew on British cruise holidays who are paid a basic salary of as little as 75p an hour face having extra tips from passengers withheld unless they hit performance targets.

The boss of P&O Cruises said the move was part of a package to "make crew more responsive" and offer protection as tips dry up in the economic downturn.

At the bottom end of the scale, a junior waiter on a ship sailing out of Southampton now earns a basic salary of £250 a month, for shifts lasting a minimum of 11 hours, seven days a week, with a possible £150 extra in bonuses. According to documents seen by the Guardian, this is "a significantly increased basic salary".

David Dingle, CEO of Carnival UK, in charge of P&O cruise lines, said the crew were "much happier" and the new arrangement was a win-win for passengers, staff and P&O. He said many crew took home over £1,000 a month, but tougher times meant that "sadly, our customers were reluctant to pay the recommended level of tipping".

Cash tips are being phased out in favour of electronic tips automatically added to passengers' bills, which pay for the potential performance bonus. As passengers could opt out of paying, Dingle said, the firm was "taking the risk out" by paying bonuses if targets were met. "We've handled it fairly and decently and made sure their pay is being protected," he said.

Bonuses will be held back in part if customers' feedback ratings do not exceed targets, some of which stand at 96%. Cabin stewards whose attitude was ranked below 92% by customers will forfeit an entire bonus payment worth approximately 15% of their basic salary.

Crew have been warned P&O's funding of the scheme "is dependent on the passengers paying their auto gratuities".

Had Glazer walked through the beaded curtain at her local psychic’s office, all of this would have remained private. But by doing it online, and by passing some of it through her work e-mail, Glazer opened the conversations to scrutiny—and even made them searchable.

As lawyer and blogger Venkat Balasubramani sums up the case, “Glazer committed a classic miscue for employee-plaintiffs—she engaged in discussions regarding her dispute through her work e-mail account. If not for this, Fireman’s Fund may not have ever found out about the chats in question. (Note to prospective employment plaintiffs: if there is even a whiff of a dispute with your employer, you should engage in all third-party communications through your own personal e-mail accounts, on your own time, and off your employer’s network.)”

A weak labor market already has left half of young college graduates either jobless or underemployed in positions that don’t fully use their skills and knowledge.

Young adults with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly scraping by in lower-wage jobs — waiter or waitress, bartender, retail clerk or receptionist, for example — and that’s confounding their hopes a degree would pay off despite higher tuition and mounting student loans.

An analysis of government data conducted for The Associated Press lays bare the highly uneven prospects for holders of bachelor’s degrees.

What the graph shows clearly, and the numbers back up, is that men took a bigger hit than women, and the decline in jobs for men began much earlier. The downturn in male employment began in May 2007 — a full seven months before the official start (in December 2007) of what became the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Female employment continued to rise for 10 months after the downturn in male employment, and it peaked in March 2008.

By the time Obama took office in January 2009, both male and female employment were in a steep decline that continued for over a year. Male employment hit bottom in February 2010, and female employment continued to slump for another seven months, bottoming out in September 2010. And as the chart clearly shows, the job recovery for women not only started later, the rate of recovery has been slower.

Why is that? “If you look back to the start of the recession, many of the industries (construction and manufacturing) that were very hard hit initially were male-dominated,” said Margot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, in an interview with FactCheck.org.

It wasn’t until later that jobs like retail and government jobs, particularly teaching jobs, began to take a hit, affecting women more, Dorfman said. Those jobs have been slower to recover.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor under George W. Bush, says Romney’s statistic isn’t properly focused. She notes that the unemployment rate for women has been about one full percentage point below the unemployment rate for men for much of the recession. It is only fairly recently that the gender gap has begun to close. The unemployment rate is now 8.3 percent for men, 8.1 percent for women.

“That’s why many people have called this a man-cession,” said Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Men have fared worse in the recession, she said, mainly because industries such as construction and manufacturing – male-dominated industries – have been harder hit than education and health care – female-dominated sectors.

Furchtgott-Roth said she couldn’t think of any Obama policies that have led to a slower recovery for women.

“Obama’s policies have been anti-growth,” she said. “But if anything, they have been anti-male jobs.”

For example, she said, his policies have hurt coal mining and oil drilling, which are typically male-dominated jobs, whereas the health care law will expand the health care industry, which should disproportionately help women.

What has been happening lately is that conventional wisdom, including among people with influence over policy, has taken that little uptick at the right as evidence that it’s time to sound the all-clear, time to call off efforts to boost the economy and worry about inflation instead. This was a terrible misjudgment: we’ve barely made a dent in the employment decline that followed the financial crisis, and are still a very long way from full recovery..

And you can’t even count on the trend continuing to be favorable — which was the message of last month’s numbers.

I was for more stimulus before those numbers came out; I’m still for more stimulus now. The only difference is that it might be a bit easier today than two days ago to argue against unjustified complacency.

The US economy added 120,000 jobs during March, lower than estimates suggested, while the unemployment rate fell slightly to 8.2%.

Analysts had predicted a fourth straight month with job growth of more than 200,000.

President Barack Obama’s electoral prospects are widely seen as linked to the economy and the jobs market.

Employment has been rising for the past six months, but the jobless rate has been stuck above 8% since early 2009.

The Department of Labor’s data shows the smallest growth in employment since October 2011.

These observations have huge implications for policy. Let me stress two implications, in particular:

1. The prevalence of zero-change wages constitutes overwhelming evidence that we’re suffering from lack of demand, not lack of supply. It also undercuts one of the favorite arguments of those claiming that we really do have a supply-side problem, the persistence of (low) inflation and positive wage growth despite the low level of employment. The reason we have positive wage growth is that workers with a good bargaining position are still managing to eke out increases, while those without aren’t facing wage cuts. More on that later today, when I have time.

2. The stickiness of wages even in the United States — which has one of the most “flexible”, aka brutal, labor markets in the advanced world, makes it clear just how huge the costs of the eurozone strategy of “internal devaluation” — getting wages down in peripheral economies, until competitiveness is regained — really is. By asking that Ireland, Spain, Portugal achieve double-digit falls in nominal wages, the Germans and the ECB are actually demanding something that basically never happens.

Very important stuff.

Oh, and someone is sure to chime in and say that this proves that the solution to unemployment is to make wages more flexible. No, it isn’t: in a liquidity trapped, deleveraging economy lower wages would actually worsen the situation.

What could I say? I guess we have another hire whether he’s qualified or not. Here’s the bottom line: My ability to select the best candidates for our positions has been irreparably compromised by looking into their private lives. I’ve been “tainted” by knowledge of their sexual orientation, illnesses, religion, political affiliations, and other factors that expose us to anti-discrimination legislation. We can’t even claim that the employee improperly disclosed these matters to us, as we are the ones initiating the investigation of their private doings
Worse, I cannot manage these people once they’re hired. I would be diffident about censuring them or passing them over for advancement for fear of incurring a lawsuit that would be a distraction to our business and damaging to our reputation as fair employers.
Therefore, please consider this my formal resignation. The COO does not tell me how to write software, so I will not tell her how to set HR standards, but I would ask that you review this policy and ask whether it is truly in the company’s interest to indiscriminately dig through a candidates’ private lives. Either that, or we should move to a jurisdiction where we have zero exposure to legal consequences for discrimination.

After you send this email, one of the following three things will happen:

Scenario A – It’s most likely that you will hear nothing back from the reference.

Congratulations! You saved yourself from hiring a B-player, or worse. You also saved yourself and the reference from having to conduct an uncomfortable, time-wasting phone call.

Scenario B – You receive an email back from the reference informing you that the candidate was in fact exceptional and they’d be happy to tell you more.

Congratulations! Looks like you found a star, now it’s time to have a chat to confirm the candidate is as great as you think they are and learn more about your soon-to-be employee.

Scenario C – You receive a call within 5 minutes of sending your email asking if the candidate is on the market for a new job, and if so, can you have the candidate call the reference back ASAP.

Congratulations! You’ve definitely found a winner. Don’t let the candidate return the call and make an offer immediately before someone else does. This scenario has actually happened to me a few times. It’s the best predictor of the quality of candidate I’ve ever seen. We immediately made offers to those candidates and without fail they turned out to be our best hires.

The following list is an attempt to cover some of the issues that will invariably come up when people without previous experience of the hacker community try to hire a hacker. This FAQ is intended for free distribution, and may be copied as desired. It is in an early revision. If you wish to modify the FAQ, or distribute it for publication, please contact the author. The author is seebs@plethora.net. The official distribution site (as of revision 0.05) is “http://www.plethora.net/~seebs/faqs/hacker.html”.
If you find this information useful, please consider sending a token donation to the author; email for details.

hours do you have to work at minimum wage to afford rent (Weekly Feminist Reader) (via Instapaper)

Mitt Romney opened a “tele-town hall” with Wisconsin voters on Wednesday afternoon with what he described as a “humorous” story highlighting his connections to the state. But not everyone found the story, about his father closing a Michigan factory, quite so funny.

“You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors and they made Ramblers and Jeeps, and they had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wis., and another one in Milwaukee, Wis.,” Mr. Romney began. “And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign.”

Mr. Romney continued, chuckling at points:

“And I recall at one parade where he was going down the street, he was led by a band — they had a high school band that was leading each of the candidates — and his band did not know how to play the Michigan fight song, it only knew how to play the Wisconsin fight song. So every time they would start playing ‘On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin.”

The story, however, struck some as a bit too close to home for Mr. Romney, whose opponents have said he closed factories and eliminated jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital, a private equity firm.

Democrats quickly pounced on the anecdote, citing it as another example of what they say is Mr. Romney’s inability to understand the concerns of average Americans.

“Adding to his list of completely out-of-touch moments, today Mitt Romney recounted to Wisconsin voters on a tele-town hall a ‘humorous’ story about his father closing a factory in Michigan,” Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for President Obama’s re-election campaign, wrote in an e-mail. And the Democratic National Committee also began sending out links to articles recounting the moment, saying, “File this one under the ever-growing ‘Romney wealth gaffes’ category.”

Arizona’s dumb bill that would have given employers the right to peek into their female employees’ medical records to make sure a strumpet wasn’t using contraception in a way contrary to her boss’s moral beliefs is dead after being voted down in the state Senate. But now’s not the time for opponents of the bill to rest on their laurels; like horror movie mad scientists who won’t admit defeat, HB 2625’s framers have vowed to bring it back from the dead.

Responding to the news, ACLU attorney Catherine Crump said:

It’s an invasion of privacy for private employers to insist on looking at people’s private Facebook pages as a condition of employment or consideration in an application process. People are entitled to their private lives. You’d be appalled if your employer insisted on opening up your postal mail to see if there was anything of interest inside. It’s equally out of bounds for an employer to go on a fishing expedition through a person’s private social media account.

Two US Senators asked the Department of Justice and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to start an investigation into whether employers asking job applicants for usernames and passwords violates federal law.

The issue has come under scrutiny in the past week, after the Associated Press and others reported on employers asking applicants for Facebook usernames and passwords. Facebook took a stand, saying it could take legal action, although the company noted that it has no immediate plans to sue any specific employers.

US Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Charles Schumer (D-NY) asked the agencies to investigate whether such requests violate current federal law, the senators said yesterday . The Senators plan to write legislation filling any gaps in federal law that might allow employers to require login information to social networking sites and e-mail accounts.

While disturbing, the problem is likely not very widespread. Forbes called it “the great Facebook employee password nonissue,” saying most of the cases reported by news media took place in 2010 or earlier. In a case involving the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, the department dropped the requirement, but still requests “voluntary” access to usernames and passwords, Forbes reported. In 2009, the city of Bozeman, Montana, decided to stop asking applicants for Facebook passwords after a flood of opposition.

Two Democratic senators are asking Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to investigate whether employers asking for Facebook passwords during job interviews are violating federal law, their offices announced Sunday.

Troubled by reports of the practice, Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said they were calling on the Justice Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to begin investigations. The senators are sending letters to the heads of the agencies.

The Associated Press reported last week that some private and public agencies around the country were asking job seekers for their social media credentials. The practice has alarmed privacy advocates, but its legality remained murky.

On Friday, Facebook warned employers not to ask job applicants for their passwords, presumably so they could view applicant profiles on the site. The company threatened legal action against applications that violated its longstanding policy against sharing passwords.

A Facebook executive cautioned that if an employer discovered that a job applicant is a member of a protected group, the employer might be vulnerable to claims of discrimination if it did not hire that person.

Personal information such as gender, race, religion and age are often displayed on a Facebook profile — all details that are protected by federal employment law.

Not sharing passwords is a basic tenet of online conduct. Aside from the privacy concerns, Facebook considers the practice a security risk.

What this says is that the system that has provided workable insurance coverage to many (but not enough) Americans is coming apart at the seams. And this in turn means that if health reform goes down, we’re going to be looking at a wave of misery spreading across the land.

Facebook has taken a stand against what it calls a “distressing increase” in reports of employers demanding the Facebook passwords of employees and job applicants.

One such report came from the Associated Press this week, which detailed cases of interviewers asking applicants for Facebook usernames and passwords, a clear invasion of privacy if we’ve ever heard of one. Employers examining applicants’ and employees’ activity on social media networks isn’t new—but typically it is restricted to what information users have made publicly available to everyone. Facebook said it could seek policy changes or file lawsuits to prevent employers from demanding passwords.

While Facebook is often criticized for privacy violations of its own, this time it’s fighting on behalf of its users.

“Facebook takes your privacy seriously,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said in a statement issued today. “We’ll take action to protect the privacy and security of our users, whether by engaging policymakers or, where appropriate, by initiating legal action, including by shutting down applications that abuse their privileges.”

Separately, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CT, is drafting legislation that would outlaw the practice of employers asking for login credentials to social networking sites and e-mail accounts, Politico reported Wednesday. Blumenthal called it an “unreasonable invasion of privacy.”

Sharing or soliciting a password is already a violation of Facebook’s user agreement.

Female personal care and service workers, which include butlers, house sitters and shoe shiners, earned $1.02 for every $1 their male counterparts made in 2010, according to census data compiled by Bloomberg. That job category was the only one of 265 major occupations where the median female salary in the U.S. exceeded the amount paid to men. The six jobs with the largest gender gap in pay and at least 10,000 men and 10,000 women were in the Wall Street-heavy financial sector. Cali Carlin reports on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan.”

A few years back, the US public’s acceptance of conclusions reached by climate scientists took a dramatic drop. It’s only now beginning to recover. Not a lot has changed about the science during that time, raising questions about what’s driving the ups and downs in the polls. Studies have found correlations with the weather and a role for political leaders in driving these changes, but a new study suggests some of that is misplaced. Instead, its authors come to a conclusion we’ve heard before: it’s the economy, stupid.

The authors use polling data from a variety of sources, which creates a bit of a challenge. Not all polls ask questions that address the same things. For example, one of the studies we linked above asked about the public’s acceptance of a basic fact: has our planet been getting warmer over the past few decades? In contrast, one of the polls used here assessed feelings about climate change by asking its participants whether they felt the media “exaggerate the seriousness of global warming.”

Still, there are ways to convert these specific sentiments into a generalized sense about the seriousness of climate change. Plus, the variety of polls provide some distinct advantages. For example, this survey provides a valuable outgroup to the US population, in that a number of surveys cover all the nations of the European Union. In addition, several of the polls (those performed by the Pew) include ZIP code information, allowing the authors to compare polling trends with record high and low temperatures in the nearby area.

As with another recent survey, they do end up seeing a correlation between acceptance of climate change and the weather. However, the correlation with local weather is rather weak. Instead, the authors found a stronger correlation with the global mean temperature. That’s somewhat surprising. Most years, the global mean isn’t especially well covered by the press, which suggests this correlation might be a bit spurious. (If we accept the economy is an influence, then the correlation will be very difficult to tease apart. Especially considering the coldest global temperature of the last decade happened to correspond to the onset of job losses in the US.)

In any case, the poll numbers indicate there are some things that we probably can’t blame them on. For example, acceptance started to drop prior to the Copenhagen climate conference and the release of the e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia. Both of these may have been big news among people who care passionately about climate change, but they came too late to explain the public’s reduced acceptance of the science.

Based on their statistical analysis, the authors conclude the economy is the strongest influence on the public’s acceptance of climate science. This held when the authors analyzed things separately in each US state based on its local unemployment rate. The effect showed up in European countries, as well. In Gallup polls, this correlation holds all the way back to 1989, when the current string of unusually warm years began. Overall, the authors found unemployment had an effect that was over three times stronger than either the local weather or skeptical coverage of climate in the media.

Put in other terms, each time the local unemployment increased by a point, that state saw its average citizen’s probability of accepting climate change drop by over 10 percent.

In their efforts to vet applicants, some companies and government agencies are going beyond merely glancing at a person’s social networking profiles and instead asking to log in as the user to have a look around.

“It’s akin to requiring someone’s house keys,” said Orin Kerr, a George Washington University law professor and former federal prosecutor who calls it “an egregious privacy violation.”

Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is also the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks.

Since the rise of social networking, it has become common for managers to review publically available Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other sites to learn more about job candidates. But many users, especially on Facebook, have their profiles set to private, making them available only to selected people or certain networks.

Companies that don’t ask for passwords have taken other steps — such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview. Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media.

Asking for a candidate’s password is more prevalent among public agencies, especially those seeking to fill law enforcement positions such as police officers or 911 dispatchers.

North Dakota has had a major employment boom, because 15,000 resource jobs are a big deal in a state with fewer than 700,000 people. Pennsylvania has not; it has done a bit better than the nation as a whole, but that probably has as much to do with the absence of a big housing bubble as with fracking.

And what this shows is that even if you believe in claims that lifting environmental restrictions and all that would lead to a big expansion in drilling, mining, and all that, the effect on overall US employment would be tiny; using North Dakota as a model is just silly.

I don’t look at the WSJ much these days; it really has gone downhill since you-know-who took over, and I find that I almost never find anything there that isn’t covered better either in the Times or in the FT.

But following a link to Allan Meltzer led to to a report that’s bad even by current WSJ standards: Stephen Moore telling us to compare California with North Dakota to see what works economically. Because a resource boom in a state whose total population is basically that of one neighborhood in LA, as compared with a slump caused by the mother of all housing bubbles and its aftermath, totally shows that free markets rool.

Incidentally, California’s job gain since the bottom in 2009 is, if I’m not mistaken, bigger than the entire adult population of North Dakota.

President Obama is not claiming mission accomplished, but on Friday he hailed the latest monthly report of jobs growth by saying, “Day by day, we’re restoring this economy from crisis.”

While the addition of 230,000 private-sector jobs in February was not enough to further shrink the 8.3 percent unemployment rate, the news did keep alive a positive trend that is perhaps the best Mr. Obama can hope for as he campaigns for re-election arguing that his policies are working.

Mr. Obama, speaking from the floor of a new manufacturing plant in this election battleground state, said the nation had “come a long way,” creating almost 4 million jobs in the past two years. But that total is about half the number of jobs lost in the recession and financial crisis since 2007. As usual, Mr. Obama tempered his optimism, having learned from the experience of the past two years that global events like the debt crisis in Europe can unexpectedly put a damper on economic growth.

In what has become almost routine on each Friday the government releases the monthly jobs report, Mr. Obama traveled outside Washington to deliver his response from a factory floor, reflecting his emphasis on the manufacturing sector. Not far from the state capital of Richmond, the site this month was Rolls-Royce North America’s Crosspointe plant, which makes precision-engineered discs for jet engines.

“More companies are bringing jobs back and investing in America,” Mr. Obama said. “And manufacturing is adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s.”

The US economy created 227,000 jobs in February, while the unemployment rate stayed at 8.3%, official figures have shown.

The rise in jobs added was above forecasts of an increase of 210,000 jobs, the Labor Department said.

The unemployment rate of 8.3% is still the lowest in nearly three years and comfortably below the level of much of last year.

US employment has been steadily rising over the past six months.

The number of new jobs being created has picked up pace to be consistently above 200,000 in each of the past three months, fuelling hopes that the US economy recovery is gathering pace and is less likely to need further economic stimulus.

Another positive note was provided by a revision to data showing that the economy had created 61,000 more jobs in December and January combined than was previously estimated.

Unemployment is one of the most hotly contested topics among the candidates battling to win November’s presidential election.

The chief of the US central bank says the US economy is continuing to recover, but that growth is bumpy and modest.

Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke was updating Congress on the health of the US economy.

He said the decline in unemployment has been more rapid than expected.

For much of last year, the jobless rate was stuck around 9%, but it started dropping at the end of last year and hit 8.3% in January.

In his speech, the Fed Chairman said that the labour market “remains far from normal”.

“The unemployment rate remains elevated, long-term unemployment is still near record levels and the number of persons working part-time for economic reasons is very high.” he said.

The speech contained no hints that Mr Bernanke is planning a third round of quantitative easing (QE). That is the central bank’s method of boosting the economy by buying up government bonds.

“Bernanke implied that the Fed was no closer to QE3… Investors were disappointed,” said Cary Leahey of Decision Economics in New York.

In an interview with Matt Lauer that aired before the Super Bowl, Barack Obama argued that “I deserve a second term.” And if the election were held right now, he’d probably get one.

A new ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows the president opening a six-point lead over Mitt Romney (and moving over the magic 50 percent mark) among registered voters has been generating plenty of attention today. It confirms the degree to which Obama’s reelection prospects have improved recently. Just a month ago, the same poll gave Romney a two-point edge (48 to 46 percent), and not since last July had Obama run ahead of Romney among registered voters. This is also the first time either man has cleared the 50 percent mark in the ABC/WaPo poll. Among all adults, Obama notches a 50 percent job approval rating — his highest mark since last March.

Greece’s coalition government on Monday caved in to demands to cut civil service jobs, announcing 15,000 positions would go this year, amid mounting international pressure to agree on austerity measures needed to secure major new debt agreements.

The announcement signals a shift in Greece’s policy, as state jobs have so far been protected during the country’s acute financial crisis, which started about two years ago. Public Sector Reform Minister Dimitris Reppas said the job cuts would be carried out under a new law that allows such firings.

Unions have called a 24-hour general strike for Tuesday, in response to the new austerity measures, while about 4,000 protesters braved torrential rain late Monday to join protest rallies organized in central Athens by left-wing opposition parties.

Greece is racing to push through the painful reforms — which have yet to be agreed by Greece’s coalition partners — to clinch a euro130 billion ($170 billion) bailout deal from its European partners and the International Monetary Fund and avoid a March default on its bond repayments.

Debt-ridden Greece has been kept solvent since May 2010 by payments from a euro110 billion ($145 billion) international rescue loan package. When it became clear the money would not be enough, a second bailout was decided last October.

So here’s what needs to be said about the latest numbers: yes, we’re doing a bit better, but no, things are not O.K. — not remotely O.K.. This is still a terrible economy, and policy makers should be doing much more than they are to make it better.

No economic indicator is a political holy grail. The American economy is a hard thing to measure, and initial estimates of economic performance are subject to significant revisions. Noneconomic matters — wars, candidates, scandals and so forth — matter, too.

But if you want to focus on a single economic indicator, job growth during the presidential election year has a lot going for it . The job-growth numbers do at least as well as any other economic number in predicting elections, and slightly better than some other commonly used metrics, like the gross domestic product.

So the news that the economy added 243,000 jobs last month was very good for President Obama . That pace is well above the minimum level — about 150,000 jobs — that he would seem to need to increase his chances of re-election.

Beyond the history, there are a lot of common-sense reasons to focus on the jobs numbers. They measure something tangible and important. They receive much attention from economists, investors, political campaigns and the news media, and therefore inform the public discussion. They are released every month after only a minimal lag. They are not subject to as much revision as some other economic numbers.

These qualitative factors are important because a sample size of 16 elections since World War II is insufficient for persuasive statistical evidence. But the statistical patterns are still striking.

In the three election years where the economy was actually shedding jobs, the incumbent party lost — badly in 1980 and in 2008, and in a close election in 1960. George H. W. Bush lost in 1992 when the rate of job growth was under 1 percent, below the rate of population growth.

On the flip side, in the election years when job growth was strongest — 1956, 1964, 1972, 1984, 1988 and 1996 — the incumbent party won the election fairly easily.

And in the three years in which growth was positive but modest — 1948, 2000 and 2004 — the races were close. A bit of common sense can explain these outliers. (Be wary of statistical analysis that substitutes data dredging for common sense.)

House Republicans have their message on the economy, and they are sticking to it.

Friday’s better-than-expected jobs report , with 243,000 new payroll positions added in January and another decline in the unemployment rate, may have sent stock prices higher, but Republicans, speaking at a news conference on Friday, found the dark gray lining in the silver cloud.

“Today is an indication of another failure of this president’s policies, 36 months in a row of 8 percent-plus unemployment,” lamented Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas , chairman of the House Republican Conference.

“The president’s team is gonna trot out their happy faces today,” Representative Bill Flores of Texas, warned. “But the American people are gonna say, ‘not so fast.’”

And Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington compared the current recovery with the recovery of the early 1980s recession under President Ronald Reagan , a party icon. She asserted that the Reagan recession was deeper and worse (a debatable assertion given the sudden and severe collapse in 2008).

Given the improving economy, Republicans had a choice. They could stick with their message or they could follow what Congressional Republicans in 1996 did — grabbing some of the credit. The latter choice may well help President Obama ’s re-election as it helped that of President Bill Clinton , but it could also help incumbent Republicans with their own difficult re-election campaigns.

Some veteran Republicans want their party to take a more positive spin and talk up their successes like holding down spending, passing free trade agreements and putting deficit control at the top of the political agenda.

Many low-income families cannot afford car insurance, at least in part because insurers price their policies in ways that cost them more, according to a new report from the Consumer Federation of America.

In fact, in some cases, the cost of insurance can be a greater impediment to car ownership than the cost of the vehicle itself, the authors said. That has broad economic implications since those without cars have a harder time getting to work, school, day care or the grocery store.

“There is much academic research that clearly shows that if you have ready access to a car, it dramatically improves your economic opportunities,” said Stephen Brobeck, executive director at the Consumer Federation of America , who co-wrote the report with J. Robert Hunter, director of insurance at the group. The report, “Lower-Income Households and the Auto Insurance Marketplace: Challenges and Opportunities,” reviewed the existing literature from academics and regulators and includes findings from the authors’ own research.

“The release of the report is just the beginning of our initiative to try to inform the country, particularly state regulators, who can do a great deal to mitigate the problems,” Mr. Brobeck said.

Auto insurers price insurance based on a variety of factors, but the authors argue that many of their methods put lower- and moderate-income families — or households with roughly $20,000 to $40,000 in earnings — at a disadvantage. Homeowners, for instance, often pay less than people who do not own their homes, while people in low-paying occupations who have less education pay more. In fact, the study cited 2006 research that found that those with less education and working in less skilled occupations would pay premiums that were, on average, 40 percent higher. Meanwhile, consumers with thin or blemished credit histories are charged more, as are drivers who had previous coverage with lower limits on bodily injury.

Construction makes up less than 5 percent of employment but accounts for more than 40 percent of the large swings in the job-filling rate during and after the Great Recession.

Spain and Italy creaked under record unemployment rates at the end of 2011, while the German jobless rate fell to historic lows — results that put the onus firmly on Germany, with Europe’s biggest economy, to take the lead in steering the euro zone back to recovery.

Joblessness in Italy rose to 8.9 percent, its highest level since current records began in 2004, the country’s statistics institute said Tuesday. Spain ended the year with unemployment at a 17-year high of 22.85 percent.

German unemployment, by contrast, fell to 6.7 percent in January, a decline of a tenth of a percentage point from December.

Regardless of how you do it, find people with enough spark to care, fight, and campaign for what they believe in. What pushes you and makes you question your beliefs will make your company that much better.

But Politifact rated it as only “half true” because he was “essentially taking credit for job growth”. He didn’t actually take credit — and even if he had, a fact is still a fact.

I do not think that word means what Politifact thinks it means.

Setting aside the oddity of classifying digital information as a “thing,” the first of these factors collides head on with the Supreme Court’s clear repudiation in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service of the “sweat of the brow” theory of intellectual property.

In Feist , the Court held that “sweat of the brow” as a justification for propertizing information “eschew[s] the most fundamental axiom of copyright law—that no one may copyright facts or ideas.” Given copyright law’s express prohibition on the propertization of ideas, there is a strong case to be made that state law claims for misappropriation of ideas are in direct conflict with both the letter and spirit of the federal copyright scheme. On that basis, they are akin to claims of hot news misappropriation, and they should likewise be treated as preempted.

To the occupiers and their sympathizers, I say vote — not with the ballot, but with your feet. Now that your encampment has disbanded, don’t just leave Zuccotti Park: leave America.

For China. At least, that’s what I did. It was the best decision I ever made.

In February of last year, I moved to Beijing, having landed a job teaching American culture and English at Tsinghua University. While I was not a global neophyte, I had never set foot in Asia. China had 1.3 billion people, and I didn’t know any of them.

But now, after living almost a year here, I feel that China is my second home. My work is fulfilling and my workload is manageable enough to give me time to travel. I have found friends among China’s large expatriate community, my colleagues and, of course, my eager students. The food is outstanding and caters to both the gastronomically meek and the profoundly adventurous.

Most of all, my experiences here have been enriched by the Chinese people themselves. Their patience, courtesy and hospitality leave me in no hurry to return home anytime soon.

And guess what? I’m not so special.

China wants you. Job prospects are abundant. The effects of the Great Recession of 2008 may be felt in the United States for years, but they barely scratched China. Demand for native English speakers is white-hot. ChinaJob.com , TheBeijnger.com and Dave’s ESL Cafe are just a few of the places where you can search for work.

A brief note while in transit, about today’s jobs report.

Obviously it’s better than we’ve been seeing. But we need much faster job growth; it says something about how beaten down we are that this is considered good news.

Let me give two back-of-the-envelope ways to think about how inadequate 200,000 jobs a month is.

First, note that there are still about 6 million fewer jobs than there were at the end of 2007 — and that we would normally have expected to have added around 5 million jobs over a four-year period. So we’re 11 million jobs down — and we need at least 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with working-age population growth. Do the math, and you’ll see that it would take 9 or 10 years of growth at this rate to restore full employment.

Alternatively, note that during the Clinton years — all 8 of them — the economy added around 230,000 jobs a month. As it did that, the unemployment rate fell about 3 1/2 percentage points — which is about what we’d need from here to get back to something that felt like full employment. Again, this suggests that we’re looking at something like a decade-long haul to have full recovery.

So yes, this is better news than we’ve been having. But it’s still vastly inadequate.

Democrats took to the floor of an empty House chamber on Friday to mock Republicans who they said were taking a vacation rather than buckling down to work on legislation to create jobs, cut taxes and extend unemployment benefits for millions of Americans.

The House convened for a brief meeting, billed as a pro forma session, and then quickly adjourned as Democrats sought recognition in vain.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, and a half-dozen other Democrats aired their complaints on the House floor and then in a news conference outside the chamber.

“Where are the Republicans?’’ Ms. Pelosi asked. “Why are they not here?’’

The American people, she said, “simply do not understand why, when they need jobs, we can’t do ours.’’

Ms. Pelosi needled the Republicans, asking if they were “just too tired to come to work.’’

Congress, she said, should not wait to the last minute to address the nation’s economic problems, adding that if Congress does not act by Feb. 29, 160 million people may see an increase in Social Security payroll taxes, millions of unemployed workers will begin to lose benefits, and older Americans could lose access to doctors because Medicare payments to physicians will be cut.

Congress often defers business till after the president’s State of the Union address, scheduled for Jan. 24 this year. But with more than 13 million Americans out of work, the Democrats said, this is no ordinary time.

“Millions of Americans are not working, but it’s not their choice,’’ said Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California. “Republicans who run the Congress are not working by choice, and they are getting paid.’’

Mr. Waxman is one of 20 members of a Congressional conference committee that will try to thrash out differences between the House and the Senate on a bill to extend the payroll tax cut, jobless benefits and Medicare payment policy through the remainder of 2012.

Even if the House and Senate are not in session, the Democrats said, the conference committee should be meeting.

On the one hand, they said, Republicans maintain that both houses of Congress are in session, so the president should not fill vacant positions by making temporary “recess appointments.” On the other hand, they said, the House and the Senate are doing no real work and meet for just a few minutes in pro form sessions every few days.

Mitt Romney is fighting to be the top choice of Republicans here in Iowa, but he’s already the top target for Democrats.

On Sunday night, just as polling showed Mr. Romney leading the GOP field along with Ron Paul , Democratic Party operatives descended on Iowa to set up an anti-Romney war room at a hotel in downtown Des Moines. There, they introduced a worker laid off in the early 1990s when his Indiana employer was bought by Mr. Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital.

“I really feel he didn’t care about the worker,” said the employee, Randy Johnson, who was flown in for the news conference by the Democratic National Committee . “It was all about profit before people.”

His appearance was a preview of a Democratic general election strategy – attacking Mr. Romney’s time as a wealthy buyout specialist — that will no doubt be used repeatedly if he becomes the Republican nominee.

But more than anything, perhaps, the news conference was an elaborate show of force against Mr. Romney by Democrats eager to put him on notice that they will not wait until after the primaries to undercut his message of job creation and financial know-how. (The room where Mr. Johnson spoke featured a staff of five D.N.C. aides, a bank of flat-screen televisions, and giant jugs of coffee.)

Mr. Johnson, now a union activist who worked at American Pad & Paper in the 1990s, described how under Bain Capital’s stewardship, the company laid off dozens of workers at the Indiana plant. Bain Capital made tens of millions of dollars from its investment in the paper manufacturer, which eventually filed for bankruptcy.

Every day I read a new article about some company whining about how hard it is to hire technical staff. Invariably it turns out that they’re only looking for people within a commuters distance of their office. I refuse to feel sorry for such companies.

The lack of available finance and support is dissuading many young people from striking out on their own.

Youth entrepreneurship in the US is at an all-time low, according to the think tank Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which looked at entrepreneurial activity over the last 10 years.

Note how the 8.6 percent unemployment rate in November looks higher than March's 8.8 percent rate, and about the same as the 9 percent unemployment rate in October.

US banking giant, Citigroup, has said it is to cut 4,500 jobs around the world in an effort to reduce its costs.

The group has put aside $400m (£250m) to pay for the cuts, according to its chief executive Vikram Pandit.

The money will be written down in the company's fourth quarter results.

It is the latest in a string of global banks to announce cuts as the slowdown in the world economy and the European sovereign debt crisis has increased pressure on banks to limit costs.

They include Citygroup rivals such as HSBC, Bank of America and UK-based Lloyds.

Speaking at the Financial Services Conference hosted by Goldman Sachs in New York, Mr Pandit said his bank had saved more than $1.4bn so far this year.

And now this. That makes three out of three instances in which outsourcing to India turned not that great, if not outright regrettable1. This is a small sample, to be sure, but still serves to bolster my confidence as a US-based programmer.

So go after that job ladies, even though you don’t have a clue if you can handle it or not. Grit your teeth and tell that lie about your confidence that, for you all you know, might just be the truth. And maybe you’ll fail. Maybe you’ll be fired. Maybe you’ll have to cut back your hours. Maybe your boss will yell at you in front of everyone and they’ll all point and laugh. But maybe, just maybe, you will be amazing at it.

If we want to create jobs in America, we must welcome foreign-born innovators. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses of immigrant entrepreneurs yearning to breathe free": This is the message we need Lady Liberty to shine forth into the world.
Yet Ellis Island has put up a velvet rope line. To vital job generators, we are saying, "There's no room for you."
Inviting immigrants in to create jobs may seem counterintuitive, but the facts are clear. Immigrant-led innovation is key to creating U.S. jobs. According to statistics from Partnership for a New American Economy, 40% of Fortune 500 companies were created by immigrants or their children. Further, between 1995 and 2005, 25% of high-tech startups in the United States had at least one immigrant founder, and these companies have created more than 450,000 jobs.

The Senate overwhelmingly approved two elements of President Obama’s jobs bill on Thursday as members of a Congressional committee on deficit reduction struggled to overcome bitter partisan disputes over how much to raise taxes.

The impasse on deficit reduction — less than two weeks before the deadline for the committee to complete its work — caused alarm and anxiety among senators from both parties.

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a member of the committee, said the debt crisis in Europe added urgency to Congressional efforts to reduce the deficit here.

“Given the opportunity,” Mr. Kerry said, “the committee has to send a message about the U.S. financial situation. I personally think it is a very important component, or should be a very important component, of our thinking.”

In the last month, the Senate has rejected three versions of Mr. Obama’s jobs bill. But on Thursday it approved a measure with two elements of the White House plan. One would offer tax credits to companies that hire unemployed veterans. The other would repeal a law that requires federal, state and local government agencies to deduct and withhold 3 percent of payments they make to many contractors. The bill goes back to the House, which passed a similar measure last month.

Zynga Inc. Chief Executive Mark Pincus often gave shares rather than high salaries to his top talent as he built his online-game start-up.

But as Zynga grew into a multibillion-dollar company with hot games like "FarmVille" and "Mafia Wars," Mr. Pincus appears to have developed giver's remorse.

Early last year, as Mr. Pincus began preparing to take Zynga public, he and several other executives decided the company had doled out too many stock rights to certain people in its early days, say people familiar with the matter. The executives chose an unusual solution: They began demanding that certain employees surrender some shares or be fired.

Those shares matter as Zynga approaches an initial public offering, expected this year, that could value it at close to $20 billion and make holders of large blocks of stock wealthy.
Zynga's demand for the return of shares could expose the company to employment litigation—and, were the practice to catch on and spread, would erode a central pillar of Silicon Valley culture, in which start-ups with limited cash and a risk of failure dangle the possibility of stock riches in order to lure talent.
Built into that arrangement is the chance that founders will later wish they hadn't given away so much stock, and also that some very early employees will end up with bigger windfalls than latecomers who contribute more to the company. Many in Silicon Valley cite an early-hired Google Inc. cook whose stock was worth $20 million after the firm's 2004 IPO.
Zynga attempted to avoid such pitfalls. In meetings last year, Zynga executives said they didn't want a "Google chef" situation, said a person with knowledge of the discussions.

The Senate on Monday cleared the way for a measure that would repeal a tax withholding program on government contractors and provide tax incentives for companies that hire veterans, making them the first pieces of President Obama’s jobs plan to gain some momentum in Congress.

An analysis of 260 employers that suspended their 401(k) matching contributions in the depths of the recession has found that most have restored them, although some now offer a lower level of benefits.

The report, from the professional services firm Towers Watson, found that about three-fourths of the employers that suspended matching contributions after 2008 have now brought them back.

The finding is encouraging, Towers Watson said, since so-called defined contribution plans like 401(k)’s are now the predominant retirement vehicles for workers. Still, about a quarter of the companies have not reinstated their matches — and that’s “problematic,” the report notes, because matching contributions are a crucial tool in getting employees to participate in retirement plans.

Of the companies that have reinstated their matches, 105, or about three-fourths, reintroduced the original match. The most common level of matching contributions is half of up to 6 percent of an employee’s salary.

Slightly less than a quarter of the companies that had suspended the matching benefit brought it back at a lower level — about half their previous match, the analysis found. And 3 percent reinstated the matching benefit at a higher level to help make up for the lost benefits.

The suspensions occurred from January 2009 through January 2010, although the vast majority occurred in the first half of 2009. The median length of the suspensions was 12 months.

The reinstatements began in 2010. Employers in manufacturing and health care have the highest reinstatement rates.

Congressional Republicans are often accused of ignoring job creation and economic growth, but we don’t usually see such literal examples of the problem.

Dold, by the way, won thanks to support from Grover Norquist and Rudy Giuliani in 2010, but is generally considered one of the more vulnerable GOP incumbents in 2012.

If he keeps making lists of the most important issues Congress should be working on, and forgetting to even mention jobs, Dold’s chances of re-election will likely fade even more.

That was the reaction on Friday to the government report that the nation’s employers added just 80,000 jobs in October. While the pace was not exactly robust, it was better than over this summer, when monthly hiring fell to 20,000. Upward revisions in the report for September and August gains contributed to the sense that the economic picture was a little less bleak.

The US Federal Reserve has slashed its forecast for US growth and upped its expectation for unemployment next year.

Despite this, the Fed voted to keep interest rates on hold and maintain its bond-buying programmes.

The decision was entirely what markets and economists expected.

Chairman Ben Bernanke said the Fed was also considering changes to its communications strategy. The Fed been criticised by Republican politicians and anti-Wall Street protesters.

HE SCRIPT Mr. Perry says: “As president I’ll create at least two and a half million new jobs, and I know something about that. In Texas we’ve created over one million new jobs while the rest of the nation lost over two million. I’ll start by opening American oil and gas fields. I’ll eliminate President Obama’s regulations that hurt other sources of domestic energy like coal and natural gas. That will create jobs and reduce our reliance on oil from countries that hate America. I’m Rick Perry and I approve of this message.”

When Sen. Olympia Snowe explained her vote against the Senate jobs bill last week, she identified only one provision of the bill she disagreed with: the surcharge on taxpayers who earn more than $1 million in adjusted gross income. According to a study by Citizens for Tax Justice, only one-tenth of one percent of Maine taxpayers would be affected by the surcharge — that’s only about 375 people. While the rest of Snowe’s constituents struggle to survive bleak economic conditions, 375 Mainers are lucky to have a senator on their side.

But Snowe’s opposition to legislation that would create two million new jobs and cut taxes for virtually all Maine income tax payers simply because it included a small tax increase for only 375 Mainers raises an obvious question: Would Sen. Snowe have been one of those 375?

That chart is from a new report from the New York State Comptroller’s office on the securities industry in New York City.

It shows that the average salary in the industry in 2010 was $361,330 — five and a half times the average salary in the rest of the private sector in the city ($66,120). By contrast, 30 years ago such salaries were only twice as high as in the rest of the private sector.

Yesterday, California Governor Jerry Brown (D) signed sign the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act, allowing farmworkers to privately fill out state-issued ballots for union elections. The bill passed both houses of the California Legislature in August and will dramatically increase the rights of California’s approximately 400,000 farmworkers.

United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez praised the governor’s decision to sign the bill stating, “Today, Governor Brown helped farm workers take their biggest step forward yet in the cause of fair treatment for farm workers by approving his proposal put into legislation by Sen. Steinberg. Under SB 126, if growers cheat during an election campaign, break the law and deny farm workers their right to have a union, then the Agricultural Labor Relations Board can certify the union.”

Employment in the US non-manufacturing sectors may have fallen in September, a survey has suggested, although output growth remained steady.

The ISM non-manufacturing index, which tracks services and construction sector activity, fell to 53 from 53.3 in August. Levels above 50 imply growth.

But the survey's employment sub-index dropped to 48.7, indicating job losses for the first time in 12 months.

However, separate data suggested the US private sector was still adding jobs.

The ADP jobs report, which is compiled each month by a major US outsourcing firm, registered 91,000 new private sector jobs across the US economy as a whole in September, somewhat ahead of market expectations.

Four states have announced that they will be raising their minimum wage rates for 2012, led by Washington state, which will become the first in the country with a minimum wage over $9 per hour.

The 37-cent bump in Washington will hike the wage to $9.04, or $1.79 per hour more than the federal minimum wage of $7.25. The raise will mean an additional $770 annually for a full-time minimum-wage worker in the state.

Workers will also see a modest hike of between 28 and 30 cents in Colorado, Ohio and Montana, as well as in Oregon, which announced a wage raise on Sept. 15. In those states as well as in Washington, the higher rates trump the federal rate. The new raises are all due to cost-of-living adjustments written into state wage laws. Similar hikes are expected to be announced next month in Arizona, Florida and Vermont.

Tsedeye Gebreselassie, staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for low-wage workers, said that the raise once again sets Washington state apart from others in its progressive approach to the minimum wage.

"This shows the value of indexing," Gebreselassie said. "The reason it's $9.04 is that it's been keeping up with the cost of living over the years."

Advocates for low-wage workers argue that in addition to helping the working poor make ends meet, higher minimum wages help pump money into local economies, since such workers often have no choice but to spend their entire paychecks.

Michael Bloomberg today raised the specter of shutting down the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstration filling the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan.

And then Bloomberg made an eyebrow-arching statement about the demonstration and the characteristics of Wall Street, according to our Metropolis colleague Michael Howard Saul.

“The protesters are protesting against people who make $40 or $50,000 a year and are struggling to make ends meet,” Bloomberg said. “That’s the bottom line. Those are the people that work on Wall Street and in the finance sector.”

Hmmm…Of course there are plenty of decidedly middle-class people who work in the finance industry in New York. But we checked into what Wall Street workers really made.

In 2010, the average cash bonus in New York City’s securities industry was $128,530 per person, according to the state comptroller’s office. That figure doesn’t include salaries, pay tied to stock options and some kinds of deferred compensation. At the Envy of Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, the firm in the second quarter set aside $90,140 per employee for compensation and benefits.

Of course, the average is skewed by very high paid employees, but it’s fair to say the people napping against barricades downtown there to complain about back-office workers and entry-level employees.

Suggesting that the failed solar company Solyndra is representative of a larger trend, Time magazine claimed that clean energy jobs grew slower than the economy as a whole between 2003-2010. In fact, the opposite is true. Time’s purported source, the Brookings Institution, actually found that clean energy jobs grew “more than twice as fast as the rest of the economy.”

I’m GitHub employee number nine, and although I wasn’t there at the beginning, I’ve been hearing and reading the same things since even before I was hired a year and a half ago: GitHub really has a great work environment, but it’s not going to scale as they grow. The common sentiment was once GitHub grew past five employees, they’ll have to start changing their strategy.

Once we made it to five employees, we heard the same thing about ten employees. Once we made it to ten employees, then they talked about twenty. Then thirty. Today we’re at forty employees, and, if anything, we’re even happier with our way of working than ever before.

Every year, promises of steady employment and wages higher than in their home countries draw hundreds of thousands of women from Africa and Asia to the Middle East for jobs as domestic workers. While they come to better their lives and those of the families they leave behind, many are met with a different reality: withheld paychecks, backbreaking hours, basic living conditions, confinement, and verbal, physical and sexual abuse.

In Lebanon, abuse has been so prevalent in recent years that Ethiopia, the Philippines, Madagascar and Nepal — all major sources of domestic workers for the country — have set bans on their citizens traveling here for employment.

While many of Lebanon’s estimated 200,000 domestic workers do encounter such abuses in the households where they are employed, there are also moves by organizations to address the problems facing domestic workers.

Again, it’s a stunning indictment of the austerian, anti-Keynesian position that those who hold it have to claim Ireland and Latvia as success stories, and have to invent an imaginary version of Keynesian economics to claim that it has failed.

Mr. Perry, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference here, said that according to a recent report, Mr. Romney’s “misguided health care mandate” cost Massachusetts 18,000 jobs.

“If Romneycare cost Massachusetts 18,000 jobs, just think what it would do to this country,” Mr. Perry said, citing a report released this month by the Beacon Hill Institute, a public policy research center at Suffolk University in Boston.

A spokeswoman for the Romney campaign called the study “deeply flawed.”

“It is based on the assumption that Massachusetts health care reform caused the rate of health care cost increases to accelerate,” said the spokeswoman, Andrea Saul. “In fact, health care cost increases have slowed since the passage of reform. This error therefore invalidates the study.”

The day after his performance in Thursday night’s debate was largely panned, Mr. Perry also sought to dismiss the importance of such nationally televised forums.

The layoffs have begun at Hewlett-Packard’s Palm division.

The company, which announced plans to shutter its webOS hardware business back in August, is sacking hundreds of employees as a result.

Sources close to HP say the company plans to lay off as many as 525 employees, and that it began carrying out that dreadful duty this week.

Reached for comment, HP confirmed that layoffs were underway, but declined to provide an actual number.

Hysteresis can mean that the costs of failing to pursue expansionary policies are much greater than even the direct effects on employment. And it can also mean, especially in the face of very low interest rates, that austerity policies are actually self-destructive even in purely fiscal terms: by reducing the economy’s future potential, they reduce future revenues, and can make the debt position worse in the long run.

Still more evidence, then, of the awesome folly of the current direction of policy in Europe and America.

The Republican bill, called “The Protecting Jobs from Government Interference Act,” would prohibit the labor board from “ordering any employer to close, relocate or transfer employment under any circumstances.”

Republicans are angry that the labor board’s acting general counsel filed a complaint against Boeing in April, asserting that the company had built an assembly line in South Carolina to retaliate against unionized workers in Washington State for engaging in numerous strikes.

The National Labor Relations Act bars employers from taking any actions, including transferring an operation, in retaliation against workers for exercising their federally protected rights, including forming a union or going on strike.

Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia and the House majority leader, has condemned the board’s move, calling it an “overbearing action” that discriminates against right-to-work states in the South and makes it “nearly impossible” for Boeing to add additional workers. Several Republican presidential candidates have also criticized the complaint. For example, Mitt Romney visited South Carolina last Monday and called the move “an egregious example of political payback, where the president is able to pay back unions for the hundreds of millions of dollars they put in his campaign.”

The labor board is an independent agency that enforces federal laws regarding unionization and labor-management relations in the private sector. The president appoints its board members and general counsel, who is independent from the board and prosecutes cases claiming unfair labor practices.

Bank of America is to cut 30,000 jobs over the next few years as part of a cost-cutting programme.

The cuts represent about 10% of the company's workforce.

Bank of America wants to save about $5bn (£3.2bn) a year as it slims down the bank that was hit hard by the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The cuts came on the day that President Barack Obama sent his $447bn jobs bill to Congress - his attempt to reduce the level of unemployment.

Bank of America is calling the cost-cutting programme Project New BAC, named after the code for its shares on the stock market.

It has also been selling off assets; last month it sold half of its 10% stake in China Construction Bank.

The shares initially rose, then fell back again amid disappointment at the lack of detail given about the cost-cutting plans. Late in the session they recovered to close up by 1.3%.

Last week, it was reported that Bank of America would be cutting 40,000 jobs and present a detailed turnaround plan.

The shares have lost about half their value this year as fears grow that it may have to issue more shares to meet new global capital requirements.

There was a brief recovery last month when it was announced that billionaire investor Warren Buffett had invested $5bn in the bank, but the shares have now fallen below the levels before that investment was made.

Democrats are expressing growing alarm about President Obama’s re-election prospects and, in interviews, are openly acknowledging anxiety about the White House’s ability to strengthen the president’s standing over the next 14 months.

Elected officials and party leaders at all levels said their worries have intensified as the economy has displayed new signs of weakness. They said the likelihood of a highly competitive 2012 race is increasing as the Republican field, once dismissed by many Democrats as too inexperienced and conservative to pose a serious threat, has started narrowing to two leading candidates, Mitt Romney and Rick Perry, who have executive experience and messages built around job creation.

And in a campaign cycle in which Democrats had entertained hopes of reversing losses from last year’s midterm elections, some in the party fear that Mr. Obama’s troubles could reverberate down the ballot into Congressional, state and local races.

“In my district, the enthusiasm for him has mostly evaporated,” said Representative Peter A. DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon. “There is tremendous discontent with his direction.”

The president’s economic address last week offered a measure of solace to discouraged Democrats by employing an assertive and scrappy style that many supporters complain has been absent for the last year as he has struggled to rise above Washington gridlock. Several Democrats suggested that he watch a tape of the jobs speech over and over and use it as a guide until the election.

But a survey of two dozen Democratic officials found a palpable sense of concern that transcended a single week of ups and downs. The conversations signaled a change in mood from only a few months ago, when Democrats widely believed that Mr. Obama’s path to re-election, while challenging, was secure.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) issued the following statement after President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress:

“American families and small businesses are hurting, and they are looking for the White House and Congress to seek common ground and work together to help get our economy back on track. Republicans have laid out a blueprint for economic growth and job creation – our Plan for America’s Job Creators – that focuses on one thing: removing government barriers to private-sector job growth.

“The proposals the President outlined tonight merit consideration. We hope he gives serious consideration to our ideas as well. It’s my hope that we can work together to end the uncertainty facing families and small businesses, and create a better environment for long-term economic growth and private-sector job creation.”

Nobel-prize winning economist Michael Spence makes this really clear: there are tradable jobs (making things that could be made somewhere else, like building cars, designing chairs and answering the phone) and non-tradable jobs (like mowing the lawn or cooking burgers). Is there any question that the first kind of job is worth keeping in our economy?

Alas, Spence reports that from 1990 to 2008, the US economy added only 600,000 tradable jobs.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

Do you see the disconnect here? Every year, we churn out millions of of workers who are trained to do 1925 labor.

The bargain (take kids out of work so we can teach them to become better factory workers) has set us on a race to the bottom. Some argue we ought to become the cheaper, easier country for sourcing cheap, compliant workers who do what they're told. We will lose that race whether we win it or not. The bottom is not a good place to be, even if you're capable of getting there.

As we get ready for the 93rd year of universal public education, here’s the question every parent and taxpayer needs to wrestle with: Are we going to applaud, push or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable and mediocre factory-workers?

As long as we embrace (or even accept) standardized testing, fear of science, little attempt at teaching leadership and most of all, the bureaucratic imperative to turn education into a factory itself, we’re in big trouble.

The post-industrial revolution is here. Do you care enough to teach your kids to take advantage of it?

Euro area inflation was unchanged in August and unemployment held steady for a second month in July as economic growth in the region slowed amid a persistent sovereign debt crisis, fresh data showed on Wednesday.

The inflation rate remained at 2.5 percent after falling to that level in July, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said. The seasonally adjusted jobless rate remained at 10 percent, a separate report showed. Eurostat revised March, May and June unemployment up to 10 percent from 9.9 percent.

Europe’s economy cooled more than economists forecast in the second quarter and economic confidence plunged in August, suggesting companies might find it more difficult to pass on higher costs and hire more workers.

Local and state governments eliminated more than 200,000 jobs in 2010, according to census data released on Tuesday. Local and state governments had 203,321 fewer full-time equivalent employees in 2010 than in 2009 and 27,567 fewer part-time employees, the Census Bureau reported. Most local governments cut full-time jobs in 2010, with the biggest decline in Rhode Island, where the work force shrank 7.7 percent. Those in North Dakota, one of few states to go through the 2007-9 recession unscathed, added jobs in 2010, with its full-time work force growing 7.5 percent in 2010.

Contract talks between the United Automobile Workers and the Detroit carmakers are entering a more intense phase, with the union pressing for wage increases for entry-level workers as a critical part of a new national labor agreement.

The U.A.W.’s president, Bob King, said on Monday that the union had made a formal proposal for an increase in the $14-an-hour wage for entry-level workers, also known as second-tier employees. Full U.A.W. wages are about $28 an hour. “We are very concerned about the entry-level member having a higher standard of living,” Mr. King told reporters after a speech to the Detroit Economic Club.

The entry-level jobs were created in 2007, when the companies negotiated their current contracts, which expire on Sept. 14. Only about 3 percent — or fewer than 4,000 workers — of the 112,000 union workers employed by the Big Three automakers are paid the lower wage.

But Mr. King said he was mindful of the need to improve the second-tier wages as part of a broader effort to win gains from the Detroit companies, which are now healthy financially.

He stopped short of saying that the union had asked General Motors, Ford and Chrysler for any base-pay hikes or cost-of-living adjustments for its full-paid workers.

“What we have to do is figure out how we raise income in whatever way is possible, whether it’s cost of living or base wage or profit sharing,” Mr. King said.

Executives at the auto companies have indicated a willingness to improve profit-sharing formulas to avoid across-the-board pay increases that add long-term structural costs.

It would be difficult, however, for the companies to resist a specific wage increase for entry-level employees, analysts predicted.