Jobs

Each month the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its Employment Situation report. This report includes about two dozen distinct datasets that can help economists, journalists and the public understand the health of the nation’s economy. It’s where to find monthly changes to the number of people employed and the unemployment rate, and it’s a report that’s widely covered in the media, but isn’t always covered with much context.

Are workplace recovery programs successful in helping people to quit abusing drugs and avoid relapsing? A growing field of research suggests the answer is yes, though their success may have more to do with incentives than the nature of work itself.

Operation Varsity Blues, the college admissions bribery scandal involving fake test scores and athletic credentials, has raised questions about how much of an edge student athletes and wealthy students already have in the admissions process at the country’s most prestigious schools.

As American lawmakers argue over whether to fund a wall along the United States’ southwestern border, the federal government has moved ahead with plans to replace some of the fencing it built there years ago with a 30-foot-tall steel bollard wall. Meanwhile, a growing number of countries worldwide have built border walls and other barriers to try to control the flow of people and goods.

The skills and knowledge needed to be a journalist in the United States keep growing as shrinking newsrooms try to do more with less. A new study of job ads suggests media outlets now want journalists to be more innovative, demonstrating expertise in areas such as web development, audience analytics and Python, the computer programming language.

Over the past year, public school teachers in different parts of the country have held strikes to increase salaries and push for other changes. Such protests often mark a breakdown in negotiations between the school district and local teachers union.

When the economy enters a recession, pundits are quick to trot out unemployment numbers to argue about the health of the economy or the success of the government’s response.

Of course, job loss should be front and center when talking about the economy, but companies have more options than just hiring and firing employees.

Journalists often make mistakes when reporting on data such as opinion poll results, federal jobs reports and census surveys because they don’t quite understand — or they ignore — the data’s margin of error.

More newborn babies suffer from drug withdrawal in counties where there are shortages of mental health care providers, higher rates of long-term unemployment and higher proportions of manufacturing jobs, according to new research published in JAMA.