Two weeks ago, the House Industry and Labor committee passed out HB 4104 that would make it easier for employers to classify workers as independent contractors when it comes to Unemployment Insurance and Workers Compensation eligibility. A similar bill passed the House last year, but died in the Senate. The determination of whether a worker…
Income and Work
This report was written by Michele Evermore, Senior Policy Analyst with the National Employment Law Center (NELP) While the US economy is flashing signs of a potential economic downturn in the future, West Virginia’s unemployment insurance system is in a precarious situation that needs immediate attention. Unemployment Insurance (UI) is more than just a lifeline…
West Virginia’s immigrants come from all over the world and while a small share of the populations, they are broadly represented throughout the state’s workforce and economy. Read PDF of report. But a fuller conversation about immigrants tends to be overshadowed by the controversy in the U.S. around immigration reform. This conversation all too often…
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…
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…