I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
A glimmer of good news in the monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released today: In July, there were more job openings than in June — the first positive month-on-month change since April. The number of advertised gigs rose 6.2 percent, to 3 million. (In Dec. 2007, before the recession started, there were 4.4 million available positions.)
Moreover, the ratio of workers looking for jobs to job openings turned down again, and now stands about 4.8 versus a high of 6.2. The higher the ratio, the greater the competition for available jobs. Here is a graph of the monthly ratio from the Economic Policy Institute:
That said, any improvement in the jobs market has been slight. And the jobseekers-to-jobs ratio has drifted lower at least in part because hundreds of thousands of discouraged workers have left the labor market (and therefore do not count in government data). EPI’s Heidi Shierholz notes:
[I]f we were to include not just the 14.6 million officially unemployed workers, but also the 2.6 million “marginally attached” workers (jobless workers who want a job, are available work, have looked for work in the last year but have given up actively seeking work and are therefore not counted as officially unemployed), the ratio would be 5.7-to-one.
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