A common belief keeps people from claiming money they may be owed: the idea that quitting a job always disqualifies you from unemployment benefits. It does not. In many states, a worker who leaves for a compelling, work-related reason, such as unsafe conditions or an employer breaking the terms of the job, can still collect.…

Under federal law, most hourly workers who put in more than 40 hours in a week are owed extra pay, and plenty never collect it. Non-exempt employees must be paid time-and-a-half for those overtime hours, one of the oldest worker protections on the books and also one of the most commonly shortchanged. Knowing the rule…

Losing a job is hard enough without a second worry piled on top: the fear that saying no to a severance package, or taking one, will quietly cancel any unemployment benefits. It is a common assumption, and for most laid-off workers it is wrong. Turning down a severance offer does not, by itself, disqualify someone…

A pregnant worker asked her manager for a stool so she could sit during long shifts, and instead of a stool she was told to go home on unpaid leave until the baby came. Under federal law, that response is now backwards. Since 2023, employers of a certain size have been required to work with…

Leaving a job, whether by choice or not, raises an immediate question that surprises a lot of workers: when does the last paycheck have to arrive, and does unused vacation come with it? The answer rarely comes from federal law. It comes from the state where the work was done, and the rules swing widely…

Layoffs have become a steady drumbeat in 2026. Tracking data counts more than 205,000 U.S. workers affected across 320-plus separate layoff events this year, which works out to roughly 865 job losses a day, with a large share of announcements citing artificial intelligence and automation as a factor. That aggregate is not one company’s story;…

When 1,666 hourly workers at a Tennessee manufacturing site opened their overtime math, a piece of their pay was missing. Their employer had been earning incentive bonuses but leaving those bonuses out of the calculation used to figure overtime, which quietly shrank every overtime check. A federal investigation forced the money back: $1,730,598 in back…

Workers who were shorted on overtime pay can claim it back — up to two years of unpaid overtime under federal law, and three years if the employer’s violation was willful. The right comes from the Fair Labor Standards Act, the same law that requires time-and-a-half for most hourly workers past 40 hours in a…

$613,037. That is the figure the U.S. Department of Labor recovered in back wages from a Minnesota restaurant group after a federal investigation found it had not paid minimum and overtime wages as the law requires. Forty-six workers are attached to that total. The case is small enough to be invisible outside the Twin Cities…

Executive Order 11246 never worked by inspecting anyone. It worked through a clause. Since 1965, covered federal contracts had to carry an equal opportunity clause, and a body of regulations sitting behind that clause told contractors exactly what they owed the people they hired and the people who applied: written plans, workforce analyses, records kept…