Category: Labor and Workforce
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Yes, Let’s Restore Drivers Licenses. But…
The General Assembly spiked bills in the 2019 session that would have ended the practice of suspending the drivers licenses of Virginians who fail to pay court fines and other obligations unrelated to driving. Without some kind of repercussion, foes of the bills argued, those obligations often would go unpaid. Now Governor Ralph Northam is…
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UVa Raising Minimum Wage to $15
I’ll give the University of Virginia credit for raising the minimum wage it pays its employees to $15 an hour. The University is putting its money where its proverbial mouth is. It doesn’t just preach social justice for others — it practices its version of social justice itself. It turns out that increasing the minimum…
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Virginia Manufacturing Jobs Still in Decline
Virginia has lost nearly 136,000 manufacturing jobs since 2000, a 36% decrease, according to Kyaw Khine writing in the StatChat blog. The losses occurred mostly in the latter phases of the 2000 and 2007 recessions, but, far from making up the losses during the last eight years of economic expansion, manufacturing jobs have been treading…
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Passing Class No Guarantee of Certificate In New State Workforce Program
Virginia’s FastForward workforce credential program now in its third year is showing good success in getting students through training, but a high number of people in some programs do not earn the matching certificate. Those who achieve both usually show the highest wage growth. For those who went into the program earning under $20,000 a…
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Virginians Have a Right to Free Speech, Not a Right to a Job
Can an employer in Virginia fire an employee for his loathsome political views? Such a thing is happening in Patrick County, where emergency management technician Alex McNabb is being fired for making derogatory comments and using racial slurs on a neo-Nazi podcast. There is no evidence that McNabb has discriminated against anyone while providing emergency…
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When Businesses Welcome Regulations
by Richard W. Hall-Sizemore The recent news that the General Assembly may not confirm Governor Ralph Northam’s appointment for director of the Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation (DPOR) triggered one of my longstanding complaints. It is not about Jay DeBoer, the beleaguered appointee; I know nothing about his record as director of this agency.…
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Map of the Day: Virginia’s Disabled Populations
In Lee County, Virginia’s westernmost jurisdiction, more than one quarter of the population (25.7%) has a disability, according to American Community Survey data. The rate of disabilities — physical or mental impairments that limit a person’s ability to work — is almost as high in neighboring counties, as shown in this map produced by the…
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Virginia’s Disconnected Youth
Virginia’s overall unemployment rate has been declining steadily for years, reaching 3.2% in June 2018. But youth unemployment remains disconcertingly high. Indeed roughly 10% of the state’s 16- to 24-year-olds are “disconnected” from the labor force, neither working nor pursuing an education, reports Shonel Sen, a researcher with the Demographics Research Group at the University…
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Amazon Deal Highlights Virginia’s Competitive Advantage Over Maryland
Many Virginians have qualms about the $550 million in job-creation incentives plus more than $1 billion in promised transportation and higher-ed investments it took to recruit a $2.5 billion Amazon facility to Northern Virginia. But things could be worse. Maryland offered an $8.5 billion package — and didn’t land the deal. The Washington Post is asking…
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The Workforce Skills in Greatest Shortage Are Not Math and Science
As Virginia legislators ponder future investments in the Old Dominion’s talent pipeline (see my previous post), they might consider consulting data recently published by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The organization defines skills as hard-to-find (or in shortage) when employers are unable to recruit staff with the required skills in a labor…
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Where Will 30,000 More Tech Degrees Come From?
There are many moving parts to the Amazon, Inc., deal to invest $2.5 billion and hire 25,000 employees in Northern Virginia. In one of the most important deliverables, the Commonwealth has committed to increase the number of bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and related fields by 25,000 to 35,000 over and above the…
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A Tightly Focused Plan for Boosting Virginia’s Business-Climate Rankings
Virginia’s business climate rankings have recovered modestly in recently years, but they remain significantly lower than in its glory days and well behind the states with which the Old Dominion competes for major corporate investment. That harsh reality comes through loud and clear in a presentation made by Stephen Moret, president of the Virginia Economic…
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A Massive Waste of Human Capital
In the 2012-13 school year, roughly 32,000 students entered Virginia’s public universities. Six years later, some 9,000 of them, 28%, had failed to graduate. And if they hadn’t graduated within six years, the chances were remote that they ever would. John Butcher provides the numbers in his latest post at Cranky’s Blog. Think of the…
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JLARC Report on Licensing: Useful, But a Missed Opportunity
As the old saying goes, you find what you look for. And in its examination of occupational licensing in Virginia the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) largely found what it was looking for — inefficiencies and overcharges. Conducting the review was worthwhile, but the exercise was small ball — it missed the opportunity…
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What It Takes to Build Virginia’s Talent Pipeline
It’s time to give Virginia’s colleges and universities some “tough love,” House Speaker Kirk Cox, R-Colonial Heights, said yesterday. The answer to sky-rocketing increases in the cost of attending college is not tuition freezes, caps, unfunded mandates or other one-size-fits-all measures like those that surfaced in the General Assembly last session, the Speaker said in…