Labor Department

When Anthony Cosgrove left a job with a small Connecticut payroll company in 2005, he left his 401(k) retirement account behind to avoid a tax liability for a loan he had taken out against his savings. Soon after, the company, Abacus Payroll Systems Inc., went out of business and Cosgrove, 42, has been mired in red tape since, as authorities, including the Labor Department, sort through the mess. He wants his money, but can't get it. Abandoned plans represent a tiny percentage of all company benefit programs, but they serve as a cautionary tale for retirement savers because they can drag on for years while denying participants access to their savings.

WASHINGTON -- Congress and government regulators are planning an array of moves to strengthen oversight of 401(k) accounts, which have become the linchpin of retirement savings for millions of Americans but are often burdened by hidden fees that chip away at their value. Rep. George Miller of California, a member of the Democratic leadership and the new chairman of a committee that has authority on retirement matters, said he planned to hold hearings on 401(k) fees this year as part of a broader effort to examine issues that undermine the financial security of older Americans.

WASHINGTON -- Employers hired new workers at a surprisingly robust pace last month and had to pay substantially more to find them, the government reported yesterday.While good news in most respects, the report underscored the mounting pressures in the labor market and substantially increased the likelihood that the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates at its next meeting, on Aug. 24, as insurance against an inflationary spiral in wages and prices.The unemployment rate in July remained steady at 4.3 percent, the Labor Department said.

It's late morning at the Blimpie, and John Dickens is bracing for another lunchtime's worth of sub and salad orders. Only 2 months old, his restaurant in Baltimore's Avenue Market has just created 10 jobs in a city and state that badly need them.But hardly anybody knows they exist.Not government labor officials, who admit they have a difficult time tracking employment at newly created companies and habitually underestimate Maryland's job growth.Not state legislators, who are considering big tax changes to improve Maryland's employment growth but who have been given a foggy view of how bad that growth has been recently.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. unemployment rate rose a tenth of a point to 4.9 percent in August as the economy added jobs at a slower-than-expected pace and total employment was held down in part because of the strike at United Parcel Service of America Inc.The Labor Department yesterday reported a jobs gain of 49,000 and a 0.4 percent increase in workers' average hourly earnings that met analysts' expectations."

LOS ANGELES -- For the first time, a U.S. Labor Department program to highlight apparel companies taking extra steps to shun sweatshops has instead singled out a suspected slacker: Los Angeles-based Guess Inc.The Labor Department said Wednesday that it put Guess, the leading garment manufacturer in Southern California, on probationary status with the agency's "Trendsetter List" of "good guy" garment makers and retailers.The wage and hour division said four Southern California contracting shops that sew garments for Guess were judged to be violating minimum wage and overtime requirements.

WASHINGTON -- Labor costs, a key inflation component, barely budged in the second quarter, the government reported yesterday, easing the pressure on the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates.Wage, salary and benefit costs for U.S. businesses rose 0.8 percent in the second quarter, the same as in the previous quarter, Labor Department figures showed."Fears of wage acceleration remain just that," said Bruce Steinberg, an economist at Merrill Lynch & Co., in New York. "Compensation costs remain under control."

WASHINGTON -- The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week for the first time in a month, though the less volatile four-week average showed continued strength in U.S. labor markets."

LOS ANGELES -- Raids by federal officials this week have turned up evidence that Asian organized crime rings may be bringing Asian and other foreign workers into Southern California illegally, specifically to work in sweatshops in the area's booming garment manufacturing industry.This is the second time in three weeks that such evidence has been turned up, government officials said. The raids, which were carried out on Wednesday by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, found 56 illegal immigrants at three sweatshops.

The largest union local in Maryland -- the 26,000-member United Food and Commercial Workers Local 27 -- has agreed to hold a new, federally supervised election to settle allegations of ballot improprieties, union officials and dissidents said yesterday.The agreement, which awaits approval by the Labor Department and U.S. District Judge Frederic N. Smalkin, will end a 19-month legal battle and avert a trial over whether the Towson-based local improperlyfailed to mail 3,000 ballots in an October 1993 local election.

WASHINGTON - - The surge in the nation's unemployment rate last month to a 26-year high underscored that the weak labor market remains a menacing threat to the economic recovery. Employers dropped another 216,000 nonfarm jobs in August, pushing up the unemployment rate to 9.7% from 9.4% in July, the Labor Department reported Friday. The latest losses were smaller than the 276,000 jobs eliminated in July and a third of the monthly cuts in the first quarter, a trend that apparently encouraged investors and sparked a rally on Wall Street.

As the nation prepares to salute working people this Labor Day weekend, Matthew McCaffery is in no mood to celebrate. In better times, McCaffery served prime rib to three U.S. presidents, brought cocktails to congressmen and senators and found private booths for Supreme Court justices wary of the public eye. He was a senior waiter for 12 years at The Prime Rib in Washington. But McCaffery, 48, has been jobless for 13 months. Decades of working on his feet have left him with a bum knee that now requires surgery, and his work history doesn't wow restaurant owners like it used to. McCaffery is one of about 5 million Americans who have gone at least six months without a job. That's more than twice the number of those who had been jobless that long a year ago. And it's the highest number since the Labor Department started measuring such things after World War II. These long-term jobless workers now make up more than a third of the nation's 14.5 million unemployed workers, and their plight has become a signature trait of the recession.

With jobs disappearing in numbers not seen since the end of World War II, pressure mounted on Congress and President-elect Barack Obama yesterday to reach agreement on a recovery program to stave off economic catastrophe. The nation's unemployment rate rose to an eye-popping 7.2 percent in December and brought the total jobs lost for the year to the largest number since 1945, the Labor Department said. More alarming than the bare numbers was the trend line: The economy lost 2.6 million jobs in 2008, but 1.9 million, or about 75 percent of them, vanished in the past four months.

With your paycheck, health insurance and retirement tied to your employer, you might wonder about the safety of these benefits if the company hits hard times. Is your 401(k) secure if your employer has a cash flow problem? Can the company's creditors make a claim on your pension fund? What happens to health insurance if the company goes out of business? Employees have some protections, even if their employer files for bankruptcy court protection, as The Baltimore Sun's parent recently did. Here's a rundown: 401(k)

The economic crisis pushed Maryland's jobless rate to a 12-year high in October, the Labor Department said yesterday, but economists said even modest growth in the labor force kept unemployment from spiking further. Maryland's unemployment rate hit 5 percent for the first time since April 1996, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It increased from 4.6 percent in September, on a seasonally adjusted basis, continuing a climb tied to turmoil in housing, credit and the financial markets.

Maryland's unemployment rate continued its rise last month as the national economy worsened. The rate jumped to 4.5 percent in August from 4.3 percent, the federal government said yesterday. More than 135,000 Marylanders are looking for work but can't find it, a 30 percent increase since the beginning of the year. That comes even as local employers are adding to their payrolls. The state had 1,800 more jobs last month than it did in July, according to the Labor Department. The gain came from the private sector rather than government agencies.

Maryland employers added 4,300 jobs last month, pushing down the unemployment rate at a time when the national economy is struggling, the government reported yesterday. Joblessness dropped to 3.4 percent from 3.5 percent in January, according to preliminary figures released by the Labor Department. That's the lowest it has been since early 2000, the last boom year for employment growth in Maryland. Unemployment in the U.S., meanwhile, was 4.8 percent in February after two months of job losses.

The increase in unemployment that's jeopardizing U.S. economic growth is being driven at least in part by a drop in the number of people working for themselves, government figures show. Hours worked by the self-employed dropped at a 15.5 percent annual pace in the last three months of 2007, the biggest decrease in 15 years, according to Labor Department data. The decline "is probably related to the housing downturn, since one in six workers in construction is self-employed, twice the average for all industries," said Patrick Newport, an economist at Global Insight, a Lexington, Mass.

Maryland's slowing job market seemed to pick up considerable speed last month, though economists warned that it's too soon to tell whether it's a blip or a trend. The unemployment rate, which was 4 percent in October, fell to 3.7 percent last month, the Labor Department said yesterday. The number of workers rose to about 2.9 million, while the ranks of the unemployed thinned significantly. Employers added 9,200 jobs, according to the government's preliminary estimate, which is adjusted to account for seasonal patterns in hiring and firing.

When Anthony Cosgrove left a job with a small Connecticut payroll company in 2005, he left his 401(k) retirement account behind to avoid a tax liability for a loan he had taken out against his savings. Soon after, the company, Abacus Payroll Systems Inc., went out of business and Cosgrove, 42, has been mired in red tape since, as authorities, including the Labor Department, sort through the mess. He wants his money, but can't get it. Abandoned plans represent a tiny percentage of all company benefit programs, but they serve as a cautionary tale for retirement savers because they can drag on for years while denying participants access to their savings.