Main Street Dollars

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Average hourly pay for private-sector workers hit $37.75 in August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this month, a 3.1 percent increase from a year earlier. That number comes from the same monthly jobs report that also showed payrolls up by 162,000 and the unemployment rate holding at 4.1 percent. For a household trying to…

A biotech cut three quarters of its staff in one announcement

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in Jobs & Wages

A biotech company just told the Securities and Exchange Commission that it is cutting about three-quarters of its staff in a single reorganization, and the headline circulating about “a biotech” without naming one obscures a specific, identifiable company making a specific, identifiable bet. That company is TScan Therapeutics, a Waltham, Massachusetts, cell-therapy developer trading on…

The Trade Desk is cutting 15 percent of its workforce

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in Jobs & Wages

The Trade Desk, the digital advertising company whose software helps brands buy ads across the open internet, told the Securities and Exchange Commission on September 3 that it is eliminating roughly 15 percent of its workforce. The filing, made under Item 2.05 of a Form 8-K, discloses cash restructuring charges of $39 million to $51…

A bottler paid $36,000 for making a worker with MS take an agility test

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A soft-drink bottler in North Carolina agreed to pay $36,000 after federal regulators said it forced an employee with multiple sclerosis through an agility test that asked about her health, then fired her even after her doctor cleared her to return. The case closed last month, and it turns on a narrower question than whether…

An employer must keep your payroll records at least four years, which matters when a paycheck comes up short

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A shorted paycheck rarely gets sorted out through memory alone. It gets sorted out with paperwork: pay stubs, tax withholding forms, and the deposit records an employer used to send money to the IRS. Those documents only help a worker if they still exist somewhere, and how long they have to exist is set by…

Fewer people filed for unemployment last week than a year ago, and 337 were federal workers

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in Jobs & Wages

The U.S. Department of Labor released its weekly unemployment snapshot on September 3, and one comparison stands out: fewer people applied for a new unemployment check last week than during the same week a year ago. Buried in the same report is a narrower number that matters to a specific group of readers — 337…

The government is suing Family Dollar over a manager who demanded a doctor’s note the same night

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On New Year’s Eve 2024, a pregnant customer service representative at a Family Dollar store in Greenville, North Carolina called her manager to say her doctor had referred her to a high-risk clinic and told her to stay off work until an appointment three days later. According to a federal lawsuit filed against the company,…

Federal agencies just told employers how little they owe back on a tobacco surcharge

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If your paycheck has a line item docking you an extra $50 or $100 a month because you smoke, or used to, that deduction has a name: a tobacco surcharge. On August 26, 2026, the Department of Labor, the Treasury Department and the Department of Health and Human Services jointly told employers how they expect…

A Pennsylvania brick plant faces $496,000 in proposed fines over silica dust it already knew about

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Inspectors who walked through Plant 3 at Watsontown Brick Company in central Pennsylvania on February 12 found workers breathing air loaded with crystalline silica dust — the same hazard behind an incurable lung disease called silicosis. Federal investigators say the company already knew about the exposure and did not fix it or require workers to…

A Captain D’s franchisee was fined $62,000 after a teenager was burned working a fryer

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