New York SBDC Research Network

From Disability Scoop : Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he’s rescinding more than two dozen guidance documents including several clarifying the implications of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Among the 25 revoked documents are a number of ADA-related items dating as far back as 1995 offering guidance on everything from service animals to accessible building practices as well as a 2016 letter on employment of people with disabilities... Disability advocates indicated they are particularly worried about the U.S. Department of Justice’s decision to pull a statement issued under the Obama administration addressing the implications of the ADA’s integration mandate on employment. “The civil rights of persons with disabilities, including individuals with mental illness, intellectual or developmental disabilities, or physical disabilities, are violated by unnecessary segregation in a wide variety of settings, including in segregated employment, vocational and day programs,” the...

From ThomasNet : Currently, the industrial and commercial labor worlds are facing an unprecedented rate of rapid change. New technologies are becoming old-news almost as soon as they hit the marketplace, social attitudes fluctuate with the share of a Tweet, and government policies struggle to keep up with high tech developments. All of this adds up to the inability to predict how the workforce will evolve over the course of the next decade. With the future so uncertain, how can companies and individuals continue to maintain relevance? According to a report compiled by PwC , a global industry-focused service provider and consulting company, keeping up with the unknown realities of tomorrow means reshaping the traditional business conventions of today into flexible practices that can adapt and vacillate with the changing tides. The report’s conclusions are derived from the findings of a research project that began in 2007 and are based on the collected surveys from 10,000 people in...

From:  BLS Reports In 2016, 79.9 million workers age 16 and older in the United States were paid at hourly rates, representing 58.7 percent of all wage and salary workers. Among those paid by the hour, 701,000 workers earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 1.5 million had wages below the federal minimum. Together, these 2.2 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 2.7 percent of all hourly paid workers. The percentage of hourly paid workers earning the prevailing federal minimum wage or less declined from 3.3 percent in 2015 to 2.7 percent in 2016. This remains well below the percentage of 13.4 recorded in 1979, when data were first collected on a regular basis.  This report presents highlights and statistical tables describing workers who earned at or below the federal minimum wage in 2016. The data are obtained from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a national monthly survey of approximately 60,000 h...

From FiveThirtyEight : The new year brought raises — sometimes big ones — to millions of low-wage workers. It also begins the country’s first large-scale experiment in the economic effects of a double-digit minimum wage. According to data collected by the National Employment Law Project, a workers-rights advocacy group, 19 states and 21 local jurisdictions raised their minimum wages at the start of 2017. Many of those increases were small cost-of-living adjustments, but some of them were dramatic. Arizona, where voters approved a wage hike on Election Day, raised its minimum wage by nearly $2 an hour, to $10 from $8.05... Some cities set the bar even higher... Low-wage workers are understandably cheering the increases. So is the union-backed "Fight for $15" movement, which defied the odds to put the minimum wage back on the political agenda. Economists, though, are watching more warily. Researchers disagree about how minimum-wage hikes affect the economy, but most stud...

From the Harvard Business Review : The study: Nicholas Bloom and graduate student James Liang, who is also a cofounder of the Chinese travel website Ctrip, gave the staff at Ctrip’s call center the opportunity to volunteer to work from home for nine months. Half the volunteers were allowed to telecommute; the rest remained in the office as a control group. Survey responses and performance data collected at the conclusion of the study revealed that, in comparison with the employees who came into the office, the at-home workers were not only happier and less likely to quit but also more productive. The challenge: Should more of us be doing our jobs in our pajamas? Would the performance of employees actually improve if companies let them stay home? Professor Bloom, defend your research. See also, from Forbes: 10 Tips For Working From Home .

Interesting new information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Where should new graduates look for jobs? What about career changers? In what direction should career counselors and job placement programs direct clients? Which statistics can government officials use to help determine how to stimulate job growth? How do employers know if their turnover and worker demands are typical? Industries differ in employee turnover patterns, demand for workers, and ability to hire the workers they need. Understanding the labor turnover characteristics of the different industries may help jobseekers, those assisting them, employers, and government officials better focus their efforts. Each data element in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS)—job openings, hires, and separations—provides information about the labor market. However, when all three data elements are studied together, an even more informative picture emerges. The job openings data tell us about the unmet demand for wor...

As reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we are currently enjoying the longest run of private sector job growth on record―64 consecutive months to the tune of 12.8 million new private sector jobs overall. We’ve come a long way since late 2008 and early 2009 when the economy, on the brink of meltdown, was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. The resilience of American workers―together with the ingenuity of our businesses and leadership from the Obama administration―pulled us out of the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes. And I have every confidence that our workers, ever innovative and industrious, will continue to be our most valuable economic asset a quarter century from now. But still we face lingering and looming challenges. For about the first 25 years of the post-World War II era, wages rose more or less in line with productivity. But from 1973 to 2013, productivity has continued to soar (an increase of 74.4 percent), while hourly compensation for the t...

On June 11, 2015, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and United Airlines announced a landmark consent decree resolving ongoing litigation about what it means to reassign an employee as a reasonable accommodation under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). To understand the significance of this agreement, we must first understand why reassignment as a reasonable accommodation is so important. When Congress passed the ADA in 1990, it recognized the need for a national legal framework to protect the employment rights of people with disabilities. Employment is a hugely important part of our collective lives. In addition to a paycheck, a job can provide other benefits, such as self-esteem and a sense of belonging, and for 25 years, the ADA has helped employees with disabilities obtain and maintain employment. More from the Disability Blog .

For U.S. workers, access to employer-provided leave is closely related to how much they earn. Specifically, low-wage workers have substantially less access to leave benefits from their employers than higher paid workers. This was one of many interesting findings in a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics article, A look at pay at the top, the bottom, and in between . while less than two-thirds (61 percent) of workers in the private sector have access to paid sick leave, an even lower proportion (only 30 percent) of workers among the lowest paid 25 percent have access to paid sick leave. In sharp contrast, the highest paid 10 percent of workers are almost three times more likely to have access to paid sick leave than those in the lowest paid 25 percent. Across all paid leave categories, (holidays, sick leave, vacation, personal, and family leave) workers in the lowest 25 percent of wage earners are two to four times less likely to have access to any form of paid leave compared with work...

THE way we’re working isn’t working. Even if you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re probably not very excited to get to the office in the morning, you don’t feel much appreciated while you’re there, you find it difficult to get your most important work accomplished, amid all the distractions, and you don’t believe that what you’re doing makes much of a difference anyway. By the time you get home, you’re pretty much running on empty, and yet still answering emails until you fall asleep. Increasingly, this experience is common not just to middle managers, but also to top executives. More broadly, just 30 percent of employees in America feel engaged at work, according to a 2013 report by Gallup. Around the world, across 142 countries, the proportion of employees who feel engaged at work is just 13 percent. For most of us, in short, work is a depleting, dispiriting experience, and in some obvious ways, it’s getting worse. Demand for our time is increasingly exceeding our capacity ...

Washington's Birthday or Presidents' Day honors U.S. presidents, including George Washington, our nation's first president. There are 261 counties that bear the name of a U.S. president, but not all are named in honor of the president whose name they share. Reagan County, Texas, had the highest average weekly wage ($1,201) among all counties bearing the name of a U.S. president in June 2014. This county, near Midland, was not named for President Reagan. Two counties named in honor of President Washington, one in Oregon and one in Alabama, were the only other counties with presidential names that had average weekly wages greater than $1,000 in June 2014. The average weekly wage was $1,183 in Washington County, Oregon (part of the Portland metropolitan area), and $1,179 in Washington County, Alabama (near Mobile). Average weekly wages in the remaining 29 counties named for Washington ranged from $428 in Washington County, Missouri, to $940 in Washington County, Pennsylvania...

During the 20-year period from 1992 to 2011, the majority (83 percent) of all fatal occupational injuries occurred during the traditional workweek, Monday through Friday. A total of 80,645 workers were fatally injured during the day (7 a.m. to 6:59 p.m.) from 1992 to 2011. Another 26,631 were fatally injured during the night and evening hours (7 p.m. to 6:59 a.m.). For 7,815 cases, time of incident was unknown. From 1992 to 2011, July had the highest number of fatal occupational injuries (11,168), and the fewest number of injuries occurred in February (8,008). Just over a quarter of workers (28 percent, or 32,795) were fatally injured during the summer months of June, July, and August. In comparison, the winter months of December, January, and February totaled 25,380 fatal injuries (22 percent). Bureau of Labor Statistics

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics : The rate of nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses requiring days away from work to recuperate was 112 cases per 10,000 full-time workers in 2012, down from 117 cases in 2011. The median days away from work—a key measure of severity of injuries and illnesses—was 9 days in 2012. Workers age 65 and older had the lowest incidence rate in 2012 at 89 cases per 10,000 full-time workers, but they required the longest time away from work to recover, a median of 14 days.

According to New York State law , employees paid on an hourly basis generally do not have to be paid for time not worked, assuming the employer has informed the workers in advance that the office will be closed. Under state law, employers are required to pay a minimum level of ‘call-in pay’ if the employee shows up for work but the employer is closed and has no work for the employee to perform, unless the employer has attempted to notify the employee of the closure in advance. For most industries, the call-in pay rate equals four hours at the New York minimum wage rate. Salaried employees usually must be paid for the entire week, without any deductions, if they worked a portion of the work week but then were unable to work the remainder of the week because of a company’s closure, the premise being that salaried workers may have performed duties, such as calling clients or prospects, from home. One of our business counselors was told by the Department of Labor that businesses can ha...

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics - Nearly 3.0 million nonfatal workplace injuries and illnesses were reported by private industry employers in 2011, resulting in an incidence rate of 3.5 cases per 100 equivalent full-time workers, according to estimates from the Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses (SOII) conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The rate reported for 2011 was unchanged for the first time in a decade during which the total recordable cases (TRC) injury and illness incidence rate among private industry employers declined significantly each year since 2002, when estimates from the SOII were first published using the current OSHA requirements for recording occupational injuries and illnesses. The incidence rate of injury and illness cases involving job transfer or restriction only among private industry establishments declined in 2011. Rates remained unchanged from 2010 for all other case types—cases with days away from work, job transfer, or rest...

The unemployment rate for the foreign born was 9.1 percent in 2011, down from 9.8 percent in 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported . The jobless rate of the native born was 8.9 percent in 2011, compared with 9.6 percent in the prior year. The foreign born made up 15.9 percent of the labor force. Data on nativity are collected as part of the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly sample survey of approximately 60,000 households. The foreign born are persons who reside in the United States but who were born outside the country or one of its outlying areas to parents who were not U.S. citizens. The foreign born include legally-admitted immigrants, refugees, temporary residents such as students and temporary workers, and undocumented immigrants. The survey data, however, do not separately identify the numbers of persons in these categories.

Presented by the Internal Revenue Service February 15, 2012, 2 p.m. EASTERN, 1 p.m. CENTRAL, Noon MOUNTAIN, 11 a.m. PACIFIC This FREE webinar is for: • Tax practitioners • Small business owners & industry organizations • Payroll professionals • Tax exempt and Government entities Learn about: Employee and Independent Contractor issues and the Voluntary Classification Settlement Program including: • Defining workers as employees and independent contractors • What to consider in determining a worker’s status • Looking at important Forms SS-8 and 8919 • How to treat corporate officers • Determining if you qualify for federal employment tax relief under Section 530 • Details about the Voluntary Classification Settlement Program Note: CPE credit is not being offered for this webinar Register & Attend: Click on the link to register for the session Information: • Visit www.IRS.gov and search Webinars for information about other events. • This event will be ar...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, the Bureau) reports the number and frequency of work-related fatal injuries and nonfatal injuries and illnesses each year. The Bureau also provides detailed information on the circumstances of the injuries and illnesses and on the characteristics of the affected worker.

In January, the Urban Institute released a report called " Current Strategies to Employ and Retain Older Workers ". Their reason for doing this can be found in their Executive Summary: "As the U.S. population ages and the number of people reaching traditional retirement ages increases, employers need to do more to attract and retain older workers, many of whom are highly experienced, knowledgeable, and skilled. Successful approaches include offering formal and informal phased retirement options and creating flexible work arrangements, such as part-time work, flexible schedules, job sharing, telework arrangements, and snowbird programs. Federal, state, and local governments, as well as nonprofit organizations and post-secondary educational institutions, help older workers find employment and secure job training. They also educate employers about the value of older workers." I just had a birthday, but I'm NOT writing this from the perspective of an "older...