Category Archives: Labor & workforce

Afghan Immigrants and Their Children in Virginia – Part 1

Courtesy of Virginia Department of Social Services

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. A government survey reports that 41,000 of that group admitted to the U.S. settled in Texas, California and Virginia.

A significant majority of the Afghanis admitted between 2016 and the middle of 2021 have been granted Special Immigrant Visas and are lawful permanent residents.

Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) have been issued to those who took significant risks to support our military and civilian personnel in Afghanistan, were employed by or on behalf of the U.S. government or our coalition forces in Afghanistan, or are a family member of someone who did.

I think I speak for all Virginians when I welcome them and thank them for their service.

I have embarked on an effort to understand the numbers and impact of those refugees on our institutions, especially our public schools.

And our impact on them. Continue reading

The Commissars of Charlottesville

Leon Trotsky, People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs, 1918

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, capable of remaining the embodiments of revolutionary duty at the most critical moments and under the most difficult circumstances…. The military commissar ensures that the army does not become isolated from the Soviet system as a whole and that individual military institutions do not become breeding grounds for conspiracy.

With commissars at every level of the army, they had their own reporting chain independent of the operational chain of command. And punishments both quick and much to be feared.

Progressives, themselves unwilling to entrust the revolution to those who may subvert it, are fond of similar structures.

Witness the broad and deep Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) system at the University of Virginia. Continue reading

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 states by the percentage of college alumni who had internships. Gaining practical workforce experience before graduating gives a significant leg up in career advancement, the company contends.

The study draws data from 43 million LinkedIn profiles. Nationally, around 13% of college graduates list internships in their professional background. The rate varies from state to state: a high of 20% in Rhode Island and a low of 8% in Alaska. State outcomes hinge largely upon the success of its colleges and universities in placing their students as interns. Carnegie Mellon University, for example, has a 32% internship rate, while the University of Phoenix has only 1%.

Virginia fares slightly better than the national average with 14%, enough to rank it 15th in the country. But there appears to be room for improvement. Here follows a breakdown for the Virginia higher-ed institutions listed in the survey: Continue reading

Virginia Drops from A+ to C in Worker Freedom — Largest Decrease in the Country

Nao credit: Commonwealth Foundation “50 State Labor Report”

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 most dramatic government union victory of the post-Janus legal frontier” – Janus being the 2018 Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME declaring everything government unions do is political, and public employees have a First Amendment right not to subsidize this political activity. It essentially brought right-to-work provisions to public employees across the country.

As the report noted “Three states experienced major grade changes since our 2019 report. Virginia dropped from “A+” to “C” for instituting collective bargaining, while Arkansas jumped from “C” to “A+” for banning it. Missouri’s comprehensive labor reforms were officially struck down, moving the state back down from “B” to “C.” Continue reading

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 Church and $152 in Highland County to $971 in Petersburg and $954 in Richmond.  One trend that stands out is how the highest cost of crime is concentrated in the Richmond region and counties to the southwest, and to a lesser degree in the state’s Tidewater region. The maps below show the breakdown by locality and cost category. –JAB Continue reading

Bacon Bits: Special Societal Dysfunction Edition

Parents can’t be trusted. Childhood gender dysphoria diagnoses leaped 70% from 2020 to 2021. More than 40,000 children received the diagnosis nationally in 2021, up from 15,000 in 2017, reports Reuters, citing a Komodo Health Inc. analysis. The number of children on puberty blockers more than doubled between 2017 to 2021 to more than 5,000 — 1,390 cases added last year alone. Against this backdrop, Charlottesville City Schools has declared its opposition to Governor Glenn Youngkin’s transgender guidelines for public schools that would give parents the power to decide the names, pronouns, restrooms and locker rooms their children use.

Can you say, “lower standards”? Ninety-two percent of Virginia’s public high school students graduated in 2022. That’s a tad higher than the pre-COVID graduation rate of 91.5 for the Class of 2019 — even though high school students in 2022 suffered massive learning loss during the pandemic and consistently under-performed the Class of 2019 students in their Standards of Learning test scores.

No, wait, don’t kill all the lawyers. We still need some. Facing high caseloads and a “dwindling staff,” reports the News & Advance, the Lynchburg Commonwealth’s Attorney has made the decision not to participate in the prosecution of some misdemeanors. Commonwealth’s Attorney Bethany Harrison said the number of attorneys is 27% shy of what it should be. If police want to prosecute trespassing, drunk in public, altered license plates, or driving with a suspended license as standalone charges, they will have to handle the cases themselves. Unfortunately, the police department is suffering a labor shortage, too — with 28 vacancies reported in the fall of 2021. Continue reading

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 “that Virginia is the best state to work in tech right now due to high average wages in the Computer and Mathematical Occupations field with $110,510 a year, 58.44 employed in the field per 1,000 jobs, and the highest current tech vacancies with 128.97 openings per 100,000 people in the industry.”

“When measuring the average salary against the average annual rent spend, those employed in the field would only be spending 21.68% of their salary on rent. Those wanting to work in tech remotely also have lots of options, with 27,563 remote openings available at the time of the study.”

The bad news is that Virginia stands out as having more tech vacancies per 100,000 people by far than the other top 10 states. A high level of tech vacancies may be advantageous to the workers, but it’s a restraint on economic growth generally.

Why the high level of vacancies? Continue reading

Taking on Workforce Development — Again

Regional Center for Workforce Education and Training, Woodbridge Campus, Northern Virginia Community College,

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 work for which there is little political payback, even if it is successful.

“Workforce development” is a broad term. From one perspective, one of the primary functions of all the public education programs supported by the state from kindergarten through graduate school is to provide Virginians the skills and knowledge they will need to enter the workforce. However, in the context being discussed in this article, the term refers to smaller, specifically targeted programs.

These programs are spread throughout state government in a myriad of agencies. The RTD article describes it as spanning “12 state agencies and 20 outside groups and some 800 programs.” The existence of local workforce investment boards and the availability of federal funding adds to the complexity. Another complicating factor is the activity of some state agencies in this area that is likely not included in the traditional list of workforce development programs. Continue reading

Status of Public Employee Collective Bargaining

Public sector workers organize in Loudoun. (Service Employees International Union)

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 drafting such agreements.  One locality has rejected collective bargaining.  Continue reading

Why Not Virginia for Semiconductor Manufacturing Expansion?

Virginia Engineering Programs

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 manufacturing priority. So, why not build the needed plants in Virginia? Is the Commonwealth organized to attract those investments?

For the answer to the last question I looked at the Virginia Department of Commerce and Industry, the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) and Virginia’s engineering schools and found nothing to suggest Virginia is making an organized effort.

Much of Virginia’s headline effort in engineering education is to expand opportunities for Amazon workers in Northern Virginia.

I suggest Virginia focus its Department of Commerce and Trade on chip manufacturing, create dedicated educational consortiums, identify available facilities and workforces like those of the shuttered Rolls Royce plant in Prince George County and offer tax abatement packages to actively recruit semiconductor manufacture. Continue reading

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 agencies determine which jobs will be eligible for remote work and how often employees will be allowed to perform their duties outside of their government offices.

That is a reasonable-sounding approach.  In fact, it is so reasonable that it was the state’s policy before COVID-19 resulted in most state employees working from home.

The big difference now, of course, is that so many state employees have experienced working from home and many of them like it. The pressure will be on agency heads and supervisors to determine which jobs are suitable for remote work and to deal with those employees who will be unhappy that they will not be allowed to continue to work from home as often as they would like.

Unionize Virginia’s Worst Nursing Home Chains

by James C. Sherlock

If you go back to the series of articles I published here in October of 2021, you can refresh your memory on the dangers represented by Virginia’s worst nursing home chains.

If you look at the complete spreadsheet of every Virginia nursing home from that data sorted by ownership, the bad actors jump off the page. Their business models treat understaffing as a feature, not a problem. The fact that it endangers their employees and kills their patients seems not to matter.

The Commonwealth’s executive and legislative branches have for a very long time absolutely ignored their responsibilities as the state legislature and as the state executive regulator, federal and state inspector and state licensor of nursing homes, respectively. There is as yet no sign that will improve. I have hopes the new administration will step up to those responsibilities, but we’ll have to wait and see.

For now, the only fix that appears viable is unionization of the work forces of the bad actors. I encourage their employees to do it for themselves and their patients. Continue reading

Richmond Starbucks Employees Vote to Unionize

Photo credit: Tag24

by James A. Bacon

Employees at five Starbucks coffee stores in the Richmond area have voted for union representation — and I’m just fine with that. I oppose public-sector unions for reasons frequently enumerated on this blog. But if private-sector employees want to band together to increase their bargaining power with management, that’s their right in a free society. I wish them all the luck in the world. With paychecks shredded by an 8.5% surge in the cost of living in the past year, they need all the help they can get.

Employees voted for the union by a wide margin, reports The Richmond Times-DispatchThe vote followed a union loss in a representation election in Springfield last week, according to Tag24, These votes were part of a larger organizing campaign conducted by the Northern Virginia Labor Federation and Workers United. Twenty Starbucks stores have now unionized nationally, and 220 others have sought elections.

WUSF Public Media delves into the issues at Virginia Starbucks stores. Continue reading

Teacher Shortage and No End in Sight


by Matt Hurt

Twenty years ago in Southwest Virginia, PreK-6-endorsed teachers would apply at a rate of 5 to 10 applicants for each posted position. Fully endorsed teachers would sometimes spend years in hourly teachers’ aides positions waiting for their turn to get their own classroom and a full-time teaching contract. Then, a little more than ten years ago, the supply began to dry up. Now the flood of teachers produced by our colleges has dwindled to a trickle. As it turns out, all of this occurred prior to the current political unpleasantness.

During the pandemic, teachers really began to burn out. JMU soon is expected to publish a paper which describes this phenomenon. My understanding is that researchers found that during COIVD teachers felt like they were not able to help their students be successful. They got into the field not to make millions of dollars annually, but to help kids. The pandemic and school closures made this much more difficult. Now that so many kids are so far behind, many teachers find it difficult to believe they’ll ever be able to help them get caught up.

This year, I have listened to a disturbing number of administrators talk about teachers leaving in the middle of the year. This certainly happened prior to this year, but it was a very uncommon event. Now, it is all too common. Continue reading

Virginia Slides Lower in ALEC Economic Rankings

American Legislative Exchange Council rated Virginia 30th out of 50 states using these three measures of economic performance over ten years. Click for larger view.

by Steve Haner

First published earlier today by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy.

As measured by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Virginia’s economic outlook has continued its precipitous drop and now barely ranks in the top half among the American states, 24th out of 50. A decade ago it was in the top five, ranking third in 2011 and 2012 and fifth in 2013.

Using three direct measures of actual economic performance, gross domestic product and job growth and population out migration, ALEC placed Virginia 30th among the 50 states over the past decade. Neighboring North Carolina, on the other hand, ranked 12th in recent economic performance and second in economic outlook.

Virginia’s number 24 ranking in the annual “Rich States, Poor States” outlook comparison will be dismissed by some as less important than other indicators of competitiveness, including the ultimate bragging point of being number one in the last CNBC ranking of best states for business. But the downward trend is dramatic, Virginia having ranked 17th last year and dropping seven places in this survey. Continue reading