Employment

California's chief of workforce development, is trying different tactics to keep senior workers on the job: offering a flexible work schedule, promoting work-life balance and creating the first government-wide employee management survey to assess the needs of workers. The idea is to find out who is leaving — and why. more »

States have recovered at different paces. Adjusted for inflation, personal income in 21 states has grown faster than in the nation as a whole since the start of the recession. Only in mid-2015 did the final state — Nevada — recover its personal-income losses and return to its pre-recession level. more »

Rose Madeline Mula writes: At the risk of sounding immodest, I did become a fantastic secretary, but that turned out to be one of my biggest regrets. We secretaries didn't have glass ceilings. Ours were reinforced steel. In those early days, the only women I knew who managed to get ahead were those who were smart enough to claim they didn't know how to type. It took me a couple of more decades to live down my 100-words-per-minute skill, and I landed a job as Operations Manager of a chain of New England dinner theaters. more »

"The labor market has added an average of almost 230,000 jobs a month over the past three months. In addition, the unemployment rate has edged down further, more people are joining the workforce as the prospects for finding jobs have improved, and the employment-to-population ratio has increased by almost 1/2 percentage point. The housing market continues its gradual recovery, and fiscal policy at all levels of government is now modestly boosting economic activity after exerting a considerable drag in recent years." more »