Education and Training Funded by the H-1B Visa Fee and the Demand for Information Technology and Other Professional Specialty Workers

CRS_April_2005_Education_and_Training_Funded_by_the_H_1B.pdf: 1087 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Self-Employment as a Contributor to Job Growth and as an Alternative Work Arrangement

CRS_September_2004_Self_Employment_as_a_Contributor_to_Job_Growth.pdf: 560 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Explanation of and Experience Under the Family and Medical Leave Act

CRS_February_2003_Explanation_of_Experience_Under_FMLA.pdf: 1196 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) and the Welfare-to-Work (WtW) Tax Credit

The Work Opportunity Tax Credit and Welfare-to-Work Tax Credit are temporary provisions of the Internal Revenue Code. Since their initiation in the mid-1990s, the Congress has allowed the credits to lapse four of the five times they were up for reauthorization. In each instance, they were reinstated retroactive to their expiration dates as part of large tax-related measures. The employment tax credits never have been addressed independently of broader legislation. This report describes the WOTC and WtW Tax Credit and outlines issues for members of Congress

Youth: From Classroom to Workplace?

Much attention has been devoted to the implications of the aging of the U.S. population for the future supply of labor to the nation’s employers, but little of the discourse about remedies has addressed the younger members of the working-age population. This paper examines issues such as whether the youngest replacements for retiring baby-boomers are being fully utilized in the sense that most teenagers and young adults successfully transition from the classroom to the workplace and which 16-24 year olds are, instead, more likely to impose costs on society rather than contribute to the economy as taxpayers. In addition, the report identifies risk factors for out-of-school and out-of work youth including characteristics of the neighborhoods in which they live, the proximity of those neighborhoods to jobs, and the characteristics of their families. The report concludes that the results of empirical research suggest that a comprehensive youth employment policy would include training programs that provide, among other things, work experience to young students raised in poor inner-city neighborhoods; delinquency prevention measures, particularly for low-income children with incarcerated family and friends; changes to public transportation and to housing patterns to give at-risk youth greater access to areas of job growth; enhanced enforcement of employment and housing discrimination laws; and neighborhood workforce as well as community/economic development initiatives

The Gender Wage Gap and Pay Equity: Is Comparable Worth the Next Step?

This report examines the trend in the male-female wage gap and the explanations offered for its existence. Remedies proposed for the gender wage gap’s amelioration are addressed, with an in-depth focus on the comparable worth approach to achieving “pay equity” or “fair pay” between women and men

The Family and Medical Leave Act: Current Legislative Activity

[Excerpt] Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) as a means of helping individuals more easily balance their family and work obligations. Over the past few decades, married mothers with young children increasingly have strived to fulfill both workplace and child-rearing obligations. With the enactment of welfare reform legislation, greater numbers of single parents also have had to meet the challenge of caring for their children while holding down jobs. Further, the aging of the population and lengthening life spans have made it more likely that workers will assume caregiving duties for elderly relatives, friends, and neighbors. This report begins with a brief overview of the major features of the FMLA and its regulations. The various proposals made to amend the act since its inception are then categorized and discussed. It closes with a review of legislative activity

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN)

In February 2004, S. 2090 (the Jobs for America Act) was introduced to amend the provisions of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) about giving advance notice of mass layoffs and plant closings in order to assist employees who lose their jobs as a result of offshore outsourcing (also referred t4, as offshoring) and to obtain statistics on job losses that result from U .S. companies sending work formerly performed by employees located in the United States to companies located in other countries . A few years earlier, the job losses associated with the September 2001 terrorist attacks and with the recession that ended in November 2001 combined to renew interest in the only piece of federal legislation - the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act -designed specifically for those who become unemployed as part of mass layoffs and plant closings

Countercyclical Job Creation Programs of the Post-World War II Era

CRS_January_2003_Countercyclical_Job_Creation_Programs_of_the_Post_WWII_Era.pdf: 618 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Coal Mine Safety and Health

[Excerpt] Safety in the coal mining industry is much improved compared to the early decades of the twentieth century, a time when hundreds of miners could lose their lives in a single accident and more than 1,000 fatalities could occur in a single year. Fatal injuries associated with coal mine accidents fell almost continually between 1925 and 2005, when they reached an all-time low of 23. As a result of 12 deaths at West Virginia’s Sago mine and fatalities at other coal mines in 2006, however, the number of fatalities more than doubled to 47. Fatalities declined a year later to 33, which is comparable to levels achieved during the late 1990s. In addition to the well above-average fatal injury rates they face, coal miners suffer from occupationally caused diseases. Prime among them is black lung (coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, CWP), which still claims about 1,000 fatalities annually. Although improved dust control requirements have led to a decrease in the prevalence of CWP, there is recent evidence of advanced cases among miners who began their careers after the stronger standards went into effect in the early 1970s. In addition, disagreement persists over the current respirable dust limits and the degree of compliance with them by mine operators. In the wake of the January 2006 Sago mine accident, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) was criticized for its slow pace of rulemaking earlier in the decade. MSHA standard-setting activity quickened starting later that year, however, after enactment in June of the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act (MINER, P.L. 109-236). The MINER act, the first major amendment to federal mine safety law since 1977, emphasized factors thought to have played a role in the Sago disaster (e.g., emergency oxygen supplies, post-accident communication and tracking systems, deployment of rescue teams) and imposed several rulemaking deadlines on MSHA. Accordingly, the agency published final regulations on emergency mine evacuation in December 2006, civil penalties in March 2007, and rescue teams as well as asbestos exposure in February 2008. Some policymakers remain dissatisfied with MSHA’s performance. These sentiments most recently led to House passage, in January 2008, of the Supplemental Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act (S-MINER, H.R. 2768). It incorporates language from the Miner Health Enhancement Act (H.R. 2769), such as requiring MSHA to adopt as mandatory exposure limits the voluntary limits (to chemical hazards, for example) recommended by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. S-MINER also requires MSHA to more closely review and monitor operator plans that include retreat mining, the practice used at Utah’s Crandall Canyon mine where six miners and three rescuers lost their lives in 2007. The President has said he will veto S-MINER as passed by the House. In light of rulemaking activity required this year by the MINER act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2008 (P.L. 110-161), MSHA asked the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for assistance. Congress increased MSHA’s appropriation between FY2007 ($302 million) and FY2008 ($334 million). The Administration’s FY2009 budget request for MSHA is $332 million