The Labor Department released state unemployment and job figures for October today that show there has been no statistically significant increase in jobs over the last year in West Virginia. According to preliminary figures, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate in October was 4.8% and payroll employment stood at 733,100, an increase of 3,200 from October…
Income and Work
Charleston Gazette-Mail - Recently, residents of the Kanawha Valley have heard a great deal from elected officials about the success of the sports complex at Shawnee Park and the remodeling of the Charleston Coliseum & Convention Center. The conversations about these two projects always find their way back to the same term: economic development. Read op-ed.…
The Weston Democrat - When we first started talking about the unusually high number of women in leadership roles compared to other counties, one topic was how to narrow the list down to a manageable amount to cover. We focused on women in Lewis County who are elected officials or work for a government entity, in…
The decline in union coverage in West Virginia and across the United States is one of the central reasons for wage stagnation and the loss of hard-fought union benefits like pensions. West Virginia can help reverse this trend by eliminating "Right to Work" and by letting public employees collectively bargain. Even as workers are…
Wage theft is one of the most prevalent but under-reported problems confronting working people in the United States. Wage theft is a violation of workers’ rights in which an employer fails to pay an employee what that employee is owed. The national scale of wage theft is tremendous. According to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI),…
This week marks the 99th anniversary of the adoption of the 19th Amendment, granting women (though not black or native women, in many cases) the right to vote. Read this op-ed in the Beckley Register-Herald. This date has become known as Women’s Equality Day, but nearly a century later, women – and particularly women of…
Everyone gets sick, but not everyone gets paid time off work to get better. Nearly half of West Virginia’s private sector workers, 46 percent, lacks paid sick leave, and people of color and low-income workers are the least likely to have access to this benefit. This means that those who have the most to lose by…
Governor Justice once again drew attention to a strong quarter of personal income growth for the state, with WV having the highest 2019Q1 personal income growth in the country. But, as was the case the last time the governor highlighted this particular statistic, there is more to the story than one quarter's worth of data…
Governor Justice is touting recently released state unemployment figures to conclude that West Virginia has the "best job rate in 11 years" and "record-setting job growth". A clear understanding of the data tells a very different story, where West Virginia's economy is performing worse than the rest of the country since he took office and…
While a number of states took action recently this year to increase their minimum wages and expand overtimes protections, West Virginia moved in the opposite direction. SB 377, which passed and was signed by the governor, exempted seasonal amusement park workers from being eligible for overtime pay, while HB 2048, which was introduced by not taken…