In February 2005 there were approximately 140.1 million people in the American labor force. The size and diversity of this group are its greatest strengths and have led to the passage of relatively strict labor laws to protect American workers from discrimination on the basis of gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and other factors. Relatively high wages and better working …
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) offers protection for full- and part-time workers in the private sector and in federal, state, and local government jobs, covering minimum wages, overtime pay, employer recordkeeping, and child labor. Local fire and police employees typically are not covered by the FLSA. It was passed in 1938 and has been amended many times over the years. There are, however, ex…
Although many historians trace the origins of labor unions to medieval guilds (organized groups of tradespeople and artisans in the Middle Ages), the modern labor movement is more directly linked to the trade unions of the early Industrial Revolution, when working conditions in factories and mines were barely tolerable and employees began to join together to demand reasonable work hours, safe cond…
The Census Bureau reported in Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2003 (Washington, DC, 2004) that the median household income of Americans in 2003 was $43,318. Incomes differed according to age, as shown in Table 6.2, and such factors as education and work experience, as shown in Table 6.3. For example, the median income of someone over twenty-five with a professi…
The number of people working from home increased greatly in the early twenty-first century. A 2003 survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of 21,000 workers found that one in five employed persons did some or all of their work at home. With technological advances such as the Internet access, e-mail, and teleconferencing, working at a remote location was made a viable option for many types of…
In January 2005 the number of unemployed workers in the United States was 7.7 million, which equaled an unemployment rate of 5.2%. According to the BLS in "The Employment Situation: January 2005" (February 4, 2005), the unemployment rate for adult men was 4.7% and for women 4.6%; teenagers were unemployed at a rate of 16.3%. Among Asian-American workers, 4.2% were unemployed in Janua…
The United States has a persistent problem with poverty, with 34.6 million people—12.1% of the population—living at or below the federal poverty level in 2002 (U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, "A Profile of the Working Poor, 2002," September 2004). While most of America's poor were children, about 7.4 million people were classified as "…
American workers typically spend more hours on the job each year than their European counterparts and, since 2001, about the same number of hours as Japanese workers. (See Table 6.11.) As shown in Table 6.12, U.S. manufacturing sector productivity grew at a rate higher than that of Japan and most of Europe, but it fell short of productivity gains in countries such as Taiwan and Korea. FIGURE 6.1 …
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