New federal data released this week puts a hard number on something many households have felt directly: losing a job is no longer a rare event. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 7.4 million American workers lost jobs to layoffs, plant closings, or abolished positions over the three years from January 2023 through…

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ running count of private-sector jobs through March 2026 was too high by 178,000, the agency disclosed on August 28, 2026, in a preliminary revision to its Current Employment Statistics program. Total nonfarm employment for that same month, once government hiring is folded back in, was overstated by 79,000. The gap…

It is one of the most stubborn numbers in American economic life: $7.25 an hour. That has been the federal minimum wage since July 2009, the longest the country has ever gone without raising it. For workers in states that follow the federal floor, more than sixteen years of inflation have quietly eaten away at…

The paycheck says $2.13 an hour, and to a lot of new servers that number looks like the whole story. It is not. Under federal law, a tipped worker is still guaranteed the full minimum wage of $7.25 for every hour worked, and when tips do not get them there, the employer has to make…

A wage that low sounds like a typo, but federal investigators found it was real. A freight company in southern California was paying some of its warehouse workers as little as $2.03 an hour, roughly a quarter of the federal minimum wage, until the U.S. Department of Labor stepped in and forced the employer to…

Job cuts across the technology industry have piled up faster in 2026 than in the year before, with the running total now above 127,000 positions eliminated. The number is drawn from a widely followed layoffs tracker and spans hundreds of companies, from the largest names in Silicon Valley to smaller startups. For anyone working in…

A new round of state minimum-wage increases is set to take effect on January 1, 2027, and for millions of hourly workers it means a slightly bigger paycheck the first week of the new year. More than a dozen states adjust their wage floors at the start of each year, either through voter-approved step increases…

A pay raise arrived for millions of workers this year without a single boss signing off on it. Nearly 20 states set higher minimum wages in 2026, most of them on the first day of January, and the increases reach far more people than the workers earning exactly the old floor. When a state lifts…

Amazon is cutting about 16,000 corporate jobs, one of the largest white-collar layoff rounds in its history and part of a broader reduction that could reach close to 30,000 corporate roles across 2026. For the workers affected, the immediate questions are practical and financial: what severance is owed, when the final paycheck must arrive, what…

Three dates govern this story, and only one of them is on a paycheck. January 1, 2027 is when Michigan’s hourly floor moves to $15.00. September 30, 2026 is the deadline several states have set for publishing the rate that takes effect on that same January morning. And late August is when the price data…