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While paychecks were 4.1% larger in November than they were in January, they will buy 2.8% less due to rising prices.

Despite recent comments to the contrary by President Joe Biden, while weekly paychecks have indeed gotten larger since Biden became president, they have not kept pace with the rapid rise in prices of consumer goods and services during that time. Read more»

Staff shortages mean hospitals in many states are unprepared for another wave of COVID-19 patients.

Even as a new COVID-19 variant starts to spread in the United States, staff shortages have made it impossible for many hospitals to operate at full capacity and now they’re less prepared to manage an influx of patients this winter. Read more»

Public health nurses, microbiologists, epidemiologists, health officers and others who fend off infectious diseases like tuberculosis and HIV, inspect restaurants and work to keep communities healthy are abandoning the field - a problem temporary boosts in funding can’t fix. Read more»

Hundreds attend the Rock ‘n’ Roll Classic Car Show at the Pavilions at Talking Stick, touted as the longest-running weekly car show in the United States, on Oct. 23, 2021.

Valley drivers love their cars, and more than anywhere else in the country, they put their money where their hearts are; in fact, it costs more to get around in Phoenix – a city that was designed for cars – than in any other U.S. metro, statistics show. Read more»

A total of 1.6 million Arizonans ultimately benefited from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, which could be worth hundreds a week to workers who lost their jobs due to COVID-19.

A federal pandemic relief program that provided extra financial aid to jobless workers ended Monday, hitting more than 45,000 unemployed Arizonans who had already seen the state pull away another source of federal aid in July. Read more»

A U.S. Air Force sergeant works with a blowtorch during air terminal construction in this 2014 file photo. Construction jobs in Arizona have grown steadily in recent months, as the state slowly works its way back from the sharp increases in unemployment that came with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

More workers than ever before are in Arizona’s labor force and the number of people with jobs has almost reached pre-pandemic levels, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read more»

A farmworker near McFarland, California, wheels his supplies to the truck at the end of his shift.

Among the nation’s 50 million immigrants from more than 150 countries, most are more likely to be service, construction and transportation employees - the people who work in fields, cook and package takeout orders in restaurants, and are the foundation of farm to table. Read more»

In a prime-time town hall aired on CNN, President Joe Biden overstated some facts about the coronavirus vaccines, and misled on other jobs, car prices and government trust facts. Read more»

Miachelle DePiano, who questioned whether employers valued her work as a veteran after she left the Army two decades ago, works as a policy analyst and owns her own photography business.

In 2019, a Bureau of Labor Statistics report showed the unemployment rate was lower for veterans than for nonveterans. But the financial outlook for vets has drastically changed since then, with unemployment jumping to 5.5% in January 2021, from 3.5% in January 2020. And, according to data and interviews, women and minority veterans often have a tougher time getting a job. Read more»

Activists wait outside Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s office in east Phoenix on Monday to speak at a nationwide virtual rally in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Rallies also were held in New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Denver.

Activists around the country rallied in support of the Raise the Wage Act – a provision that would eventually raise the federally required minimum wage to $15 an hour – included in President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package. More than 1.6 million workers, mainly in the restaurant industry, are paid a minimum wage in the U.S. as low as $7.25 on the federal level and, more recently in Arizona, $12.15 an hour. Read more»

Economists have expressed optimism that a COVID-19 vaccine and getting as many people immunized as possible will help Arizona get back on its feet.

As COVID-19 pummels away in Arizona, unemployment in the state dipped slightly in December, with the restaurant and entertainment industries continuing to take the hardest hits. The unemployment rate dropped 0.5%, putting Arizona among 20 states to post December decreases. Read more»

Arizona’s unemployment rate was almost cut in half last month, falling from 10.7% in July to 5.9% in August, the lowest number since the pandemic hit. While they welcomed the drop, some economists cautioned that the numbers may reflect a shrinking labor pool as much as a gain in jobs.

Arizona’s unemployment rate plummeted last month to almost pre-pandemic levels, falling from 10.7% in July to 5.9% in August, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Read more»

The number of Medicaid recipients in Arizona rose to more than 2 million this summer, after a five-month surge that mirrored the impact of COVID-19. Experts said the increase was not as large as they had feared, but also said there’s no way to predict what happens next.

The number of people on Arizona’s Medicaid rolls topped 2 million this summer, after a five-month surge in enrollment that coincided with COVID-19’s hit to the state’s health and its economy. Read more»

More than 418,000 Arizonans – and 26 million Americans – have filed for unemployment in the past five weeks, a record pace for jobless claims. The losses, traceable to the COVID-19 shutdown, amount to two-thirds of the jobs added to the Arizona economy in the past 10 years.

New jobless claims in Arizona over the past five weeks have wiped out two-thirds of the new jobs created in the state over 10 years, according to the latest numbers from the Arizona Department of Economic Security. Read more»

In 1976, a few years after OSHA was created, Congress attached a rider to the agency’s budget that exempted farms with 10 or fewer employees from enforcement. It shields farm owners from accountability when their workers die in preventable accidents. Read more»

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