Workers

From hazy days spent lifeguarding at the local swimming hole to doling out endless soft-serve ice cream cones, summer means millions of teens across the U.S. are getting to work.

Around 6 million people aged 16 to 19 will work this summer, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The rest of the year, employment levels for these teens hover around 4 million to 5 million, so an additional 1 million to 2 million teens usually get jobs during the summer.

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.

Pick a huge company out of a hat and it wouldn’t be surprising to find that the pay gap between the CEO and the average worker has been widening for decades.

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.