Seventy may be the new 60, and 80 may be the new 70, but 85 is still fairly old to be in the workforce. But according to U.S. Labor Department data, it is the era of old workers has arrived. Overall, 255,000 Americans 85 years old or older held jobs in the U.S. economy during the past year. That'...

In a recent article by Ephrat Livni , the job experts asks "Want to love your job? Read this article." Her piece notes that in the view of many, the new dream job is none at all. A cadre of ambitious upper-middle-class types are now devoted to achieving early retirement, so they can spend the rest...

Following the death of a baby orca whale in the San Juan Islands, and the heartbreaking coverage of its mother, carrying the baby's body through the water for well over a week, a native leader in our region makes an impassioned plea to remove the four Snake River dams, restoring the river and increa...

While he was in his twenties, Fritz Gilbert knew that he didn't want to die at his desk. Earlier this year, Gilbert retired at 55. He has started saving decades ago and now made himself available to answer one of the trickiest decisions: When should a worker retire? The question is deeply pers...

Starbucks just pledged to eliminate plastic straws by 2020. To date, it is the biggest food and beverage company to make this move, so the ban is more than just symbolic. Starbucks customers use more than one billion plastic straws each year. The decision could encourage other companies to go the...

Last week the Labor Department announced that the U.S. unemployment rate crept up to 4 percent in June, but for promising reasons, as hundreds of thousands more Americans sought work. In fact, for the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is now greater than the number of people...

"Sleeping on the job has long been frowned upon, but office napping may finally be climbing out from under the desk." So ran the headline in a recent Chicago Tribune story. The number of employers who encourage sleep-deprived employees to take a short nap during the workday is on the rise, and th...

When we talk about workers who need flexibility to manage their personal lives and family responsibilities, most people envision a working mother. The leading assumption is that working moms want and need flexibility at work. It's true, of course, that many working mothers carry the load of double s...

When she got pregnant, Otisha Woolbright asked to stop lifting heavy trays at Walmart. Her boss said she had seen Demi Moore do a flip on TV when she was nearly full-term — so being pregnant was “no excuse.” Ms. Woolbright kept lifting until she got injured. For years, American companie...

Last year when a bombshell story set of investigations into alarmingly high injury rates at Tesla's electric car factory, the CEO Elon Musk emailed the entire company to express his concern and sympathy: “No words can express how much I care about your safety and wellbeing,” he wrote. “Going f...