For the first time on record there are more seniors than teenagers in the American labor force. Starting last fall the number of older workers surpassed the number of teenage workers for the first time since 1948, when the Labor Department first began collecting statistics. If you look at just the employment of older workers versus teenagers — that is, how many workers actually have jobs — you will also find that older people surpassed teenagers for the first time recently, in mid-2008.

Meanwhile, teenagers have been having an especially rough time in the job market partly because the economy is still weak and partly, because employers may be discouraged from hiring teenage workers because of recent minimum-wage increases. As a result, many are unemployed, and many others have given up looking for work altogether.

This lowers their labor-force participation rate, which had already been declining even before the recession began: Older people needing work + more younger people giving up on work = grandparents surpassing grandchildren in the labor force.

Study reports women suffer stress and bear the heaviest burdens, July 26, 2010 on eCareDiary.com’s radio show authors share solutions.

Laurel Kennedy Author of The Daughter Trap and Margery Pabst, author of Enrich Your Caregiving Journey. Both Kennedy and Pabst offer proven strategies to increase caregivers’ emotional health and ease family conflicts. The Laurel Kennedy interview will air at 2pm EDT on July 26th. To listen, click here. The show featuring Margery Pabst is now available for free download by clicking here.

Everyone knows the basic information about the 4^th of July and how it came to be.  Here are some fun pieces of trivia you may not know:

John Hancock was the only person to actually sign the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.  Most people (50 of them) signed it on August 2, 1776.

3 US presidents have died on July 4^th.  Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day in 1826.  James Monroe died 5 years later.

Calvin Coolidge is the only US president born on July 4^th.

The first public Fourth of July event at the White House was in 1804.

July 4^th did not become a legal federal holiday until 1941.

11 places in the US have “independence” in their names.  Independence, MO is the most populous.

The lettuce on your burger or in your salad probably came from California.  They grow the most lettuce in the US.

The ketchup on your hot dogs also came from California.  They account for 95% of the processed tomatoes in the country.

There is a 50% chance the potatoes in your potato salad came from Idaho or Washington State.

Most fireworks for the July 4^th celebrations are imported from China.

It just makes sense and it could add to your bottom line. Unfortunately in an article in CNN I read that companies are not hiring people that are unemployed but seemed to be picking the ones who have jobs!  It is not against the law for companies to exclude the unemployed when trying to fill positions, but Judy Conti, a lobbyist for the National Employment Law Project, said the practice is a bad one.

“Making that kind of automatic cut is senseless; you could be missing out on the best person of all,” she said. “There are millions of people who are unemployed through no fault of their own. If an employer feels that the best qualified are the ones already working, they have no appreciation of the crisis we’re in right now.”

Judy Conti; added that firms that hire unemployed job seekers could also benefit from a recently-passed tax break that essentially exempts them from paying the 6.2% of the new hire’s wages in Social Security taxes for the rest of this year. It’s a neat and attractive bonus for companies to begin to do what’s right for the economy and the unemployed!