The last time a permanent national policy was passed to address the need for family and medical leave was 28 years ago. In 1993, Congress passed the Family Medical Leave Act, which provided some private sector employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for the arrival of a child, time off for one’s…
Economy
West Virginia MetroNews - More than 8,000 state residents receiving unemployment benefits under a pandemic-related program are in their last week of receiving those benefits. Read the full article. Gov. Jim Justice announced last month that the additional $300 weekly benefit would end on June 19. WorkForce West Virginia acting Commissioner Scott Adkins said Tuesday independent…
Huntington Herald-Dispatch - A retired high-ranking official for the Drug Enforcement Administration testified in Charleston on Monday that distributors accused of fueling the region’s opioid crisis were on alert they needed to rein in their distribution practices as early as 2005. Read the full article. The distributors responded by bombarding the DEA with reports of…
Southerly, Energy News Network, Daily Yonder - Nina McCoy has been waiting for an answer to a question for 40 years: What happens to a coal county and the people who live in it when all the coal is gone? She still has the 1981 articles from when both the New York Times and the Louisville Courier-Journal posed the same question.…
The Dominion Post - Mason Anderson is a 21-year-old contracted worker at Mobile Power Washing who works at the coal-fired Fort Martin power plant in Maidsville, West Virginia. Last year, he decided he wasn’t going to continue his education at West Virginia University in civil engineering. Instead, he decided to attend asynchronous courses at Salem…
Charleston Gazette-Mail - West Virginia’s bridges, dams, drinking water, roads and wastewater have received a D grade from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and 24% of the state’s residents live in a broadband desert. Furthermore, 54% live in a child care desert and 19% of children in the state live in poverty. Read the…
Brooklyn Daily Eagle - Businesses could be spared billions of dollars of higher taxes in coming years — potentially freeing up money to spend on employees or invest in their operations — as a result of federal coronavirus aid flowing to the states. Read the full article. Governors and lawmakers in more than half the…
Beckley Register-Herald - For a state that has given much to build this nation of steel, laboring in the coal mines all these years, it is frustrating to watch West Virginia’s two U.S. senators stand in the way of the Biden administrative plan to repay a portion of that debt. Read the full article. Yes,…
West Virginia MetroNews - Gov. Jim Justice touted West Virginia’s improving unemployment rate while also saying not enough residents are going back to work. Read the full article. The statements were in two different parts of his regular pandemic briefing today. In one, he touted this week’s report that West Virginia’s unemployment rate has dropped to 5.8…
Overview Read the full fact sheet here. Under the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), states, cities, counties, U.S. territories, and tribal nations will receive a total of $350 billion in Fiscal Recovery Funds to respond to the COVID-19 emergency and help bring back jobs. In West Virginia, the state government will receive $1.355 billion and…