The Chicago Tribune's Mary Owens has a good piece on one consequence of the recession -- the lack of summer jobs for teenagers. Jobs that teens in Chicago, and elsewhere, used to get at fast food restaurants or retail stores either no longer exist or have been taken by ...

The Washington Post's Michael A. Fletcher and Dana Hedgpeth have a report on unemployment benefits that includes Arizona Sen. John Kyl doubting that the continual extension of these benefits helps the economy. The Post frustratingly doesn't point out that Kyl is probably wrong. Almost every economist agrees that these benefits do, indeed, stimulate the economy by putting money into the hands of people likely to spend that money immediately.

The New York Times' Carl Hulse reports: The Senate ended a politically charged impasse over unemployment pay on Tuesday night, voting to allow jobless Americans in danger of exhausting their benefits another month of aid. The bipartisan 78 to 19 vote in favor of the extended compensation came after Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, dropped his objection to extending unemployment compensation in exchange for a largely symbolic vote on paying for the aid. The measure, which now goes to President Obama, should also allow 2,000 federal workers furloughed from the Department of Transportation to return to work as early as Wednesday and construction to resume on dozens of highway projects. Senators now will begin debating in earnest a much broader bill that would extend the safety net programs through the end of the year. Bunning's toying with the lives of more than one million unemployed workers shows the hypocrisy of members of Congress that invoke the national deficit.

At midnight, the unemployment benefits for 1.1 million Americans expired, including 15,000 in Illinois. Mother Jones' James Ridgeway explains that the benefits have expired because once again the U.S. Senate is behaving more like an eccentric private club ...

The Chicago Tribune's Lisa Black reports that school districts across Illinois are facing multi-million dollar deficits and will have to lay off hundreds of employees. Districts can get no relief from the state -- which Black notes has a $13 billion deficit in a budget that is $28 billion ...

The New York Times' Peter Goodman had a really fantastic -- and depressing -- piece this weekend on the bleak future of the American labor market. How much it has to do with government, I suppose, is determined by how much of a role you think government should play ...

[caption id="attachment_6756" align="alignleft" width="192" caption="Scott Brown"][/caption] The American Prospect's Monica Potts has a nice piece questioning claims from our newest U.S. Senator, Scott Brown, that federal government employees are paid too much: The hand-wringing over how much government employees are paid is perennial. It trades on the image of a nameless bureaucrat stamping papers in an office bloated with redundant, union-protected workers who do very little work for great pay and too many holidays. That competency and talent are as important in the public sphere -- remember Michael Brown at FEMA? -- as they are in the private sector is often forgotten. Because the government employs a wide-range of workers, wholesale comparisons between government and private-sector workers are often unfair. Moreover, they're usually not even accurate. ....The Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers put average federal wages at $68,740, while private-sector wages averagedout at $42,270. The disparity is still there, in part because the nation's overall work force skews more toward blue-collar jobs than does the federal government. But $68,000 sounds less "lavish" than "respectable." Whether a worker makes more or less in the public sphere depends a lot on what job he or she is doing: Nurses make more, and petroleum engineers make less. Cashiers in government jobs make a lot more, $34,000, than the $18,000 of their private-sector counterparts. Brown argues that his crusade against federal government salaries is because of needed "belt-tightening."  Potts, though, believes that Brown's real point is that government should have far fewer employees, regardless of whether the country is in a recession. Pott's hypothesis is probably correct, but as long as we're speculating on Brown's motives, let me throw out another one -- this is not just an anti-government message but also an anti-union message.

The Wall Street Journal's Phil Izzo reports on a couple of disquieting recession-related statistics: First, a quarter of the 8.4 million jobs lost in the recession are never, ever coming back -- these jobs have been permanently outsourced, automated or simply disappeared. Second, the U.S. labor market is expected ...

Another day, another example of the U.S. Senate putting the federal government in paralysis. The New York Times' Steven Greenhouse reports that the National Labor Relations Board, which polices labor union laws, has only two members when it is supposed to have five. This results in a lot ...

Via ProPublica, the Miami Herald's John Dorschner reports on the shortfalls of COBRA, the federal and state government program to help the recently unemployed get health insurance. Some of this terrain was covered in an excellent Wall Street Journal piece last week by Ianthe Jeanne Dugan: Under the ...