Category: Labor and Workforce
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The Box and the Snowball
by Joe Fitzgerald There’s a box, and there’s a snowball. The box is the support of the Bluestone Town Center. It is a well-constructed but beautifully decorated box, built on strong buzzwords. Affordable Housing, and Climate Change, and Dense Development are the shiny wrapping on this gift. The snowball of opposition rolling toward City Hall…
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Things Fall Apart: Workforce Edition
by James A. Bacon A friend of mine, a Richmond-area attorney, received this message from his accountant explaining the increasingly difficult conditions in which his business was operating: Increasingly, we’ve experienced extreme disruption with our US Postal Service as well as the handling of payments by government agencies, regardless if they have confirmed delivery. This…
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Factoid of the Day: It Still Pays to Work in Virginia
In three states — Washington, Massachusetts, and New Jersey — a family of four can earn more than $100,000 annually in equivalent government benefits, according to a study, “Paying Americans Not to Work,” published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. The earned income equivalent for the state of Washington is a mind-boggling $122,653 a year,…
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Workforce Development: Wrestling with the Alligator
by James A. Bacon Governor Glenn Youngkin wants to consolidate the plethora of Virginia’s workforce development programs spread across 13 agencies and six secretariats, according to Virginia Public Media. Not only do these programs consume $485 million in federal and state funding but there are a bewildering 1,500 of them. I find that number so astonishing as…
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Afghan Immigrants and Their Children in Virginia – Part 1
by James C. Sherlock The flow of Afghan refugees into Virginia has been at a much higher volume than is generally appreciated. I have data on Virginia resettlements of Afghanis from 2016 through the middle of 2021, when the total was 8,560. The current total is far higher as a result of the Kabul airlift.…
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The Commissars of Charlottesville
by James C. Sherlock Leon Trotsky, who headed the Red Army from 1917-22, did not trust it. On 6 April 1918, he wrote in Isvestia: The military commissar is the direct political agent of Soviet power within the army. His post is of the highest importance. Commissars are appointed from the ranks of exemplary revolutionaries,…
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Internships and Upward Mobility
by James A. Bacon From time immemorial, it has been a priority of Virginia governors of both parties to promote workforce development through community college, job training programs, apprenticeships, and the like. An under-utilized strategy, suggests Beyond Academy, is college internships. Beyond Academy, which markets international internship programs, has published a report ranking the 50…
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Virginia Drops from A+ to C in Worker Freedom — Largest Decrease in the Country
by F. Vincent Vernuccio Virginia’s ranking fell more than any other state in the Commonwealth Foundation’s 50 State Labor Report “The Battle for Worker Freedom in the States: Grading State Labor Laws.” Virginia plunged from an “A+” ranking in 2019 to a dismal “C” this year. This was due to what the report called “[t]he…
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Opioid Epidemic Costs Virginians $3.5 Billion a Year
Over and above the lives it has destroyed, the opioid epidemic cost Virginia’s economy about $3.5 billion in 2020, according to data published by the Virginia Department of Health. The major costs calculated include lost labor, health care and crime. Mapping the costs by locality, the database shows per-capita costs ranging from $132 in Falls…
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Virginia as Tech Worker Paradise?
There is good news and bad news in a recent ranking of the best places in the U.S. “to work in tech” by Zurich, Switzerland-based SmallPDF, a company that converts PDF files to Word files. The good news is that Virginia ranks at the top of the list. From the press release: The research found…
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Taking on Workforce Development — Again
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The Richmond Times-Dispatch (RTD) reports that Governor Glenn Youngkin plans to present a major restructuring of Virginia’s workforce development efforts to the 2023 General Assembly. I commend the Governor for taking this issue on. It is the sort of “good government” initiative that needs to be done, but requires a lot of…
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Status of Public Employee Collective Bargaining
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The Virginia Mercury has performed a service by compiling a list of the status of public employee bargaining in the Commonwealth. So far, eight jurisdictions have adopted ordinances authorizing collective bargaining agreements. There is activity in another six localities. “Activity” is defined as campaigns advocating collective bargaining agreements or local government officials…
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Why Not Virginia for Semiconductor Manufacturing Expansion?
by James C. Sherlock Among the things that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made clear is the vulnerability of Taiwan and with it, the access of the U.S. economy to the 90% of advanced computer chips manufactured there. The national security requirement for domestic chip manufacturing brings opportunity. It is the nation’s most urgent…
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Deja Vu, All Over Again
by Dick Hall-Sizemore As reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Governor Youngkin “wants state employees back in their offices under a new telework policy that will take effect July 5 to guide executive branch agencies out of workplace restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic.” To that effect, he has announced a policy that will let state…