Business & Workplace

Self-employed Americans and the workers they hired accounted for 44 million jobs in 2014, or 30% of the national workforce. Hiring is more prevalent among self-employed Asians, whites and men.

Women most often are the ones who adjust their schedules and make compromises when the needs of children and other family members collide with work, data show.

The number of businesses owned by women and minorities has grown considerably in recent years, particularly in certain industries, but based on revenue they remain on average considerably smaller than white- or male-owned firms.

Proposed new overtime rules would make nearly 5 million white-collar workers eligible for time-and-a-half – mostly retail and food service managers, office administrators, low-level financial workers and other modestly paid managers and office professionals.

Helped by the economic recovery, the share not working or enrolled in school dropped to a historic low of 16% by 2014, a Pew Research Center analysis found.

Despite improvements in the labor market, Millennials today are less likely to be living independently of their families and establishing their own households than they were in the depths of the Great Recession.

Fewer teens are working summer jobs, but those who are are more likely to be in the accommodation and food service sector and less likely to be working retail.

The share of teens working summer jobs has dwindled, from well over half as recently as the 1980s to less than a third last year.

More than half (50.9%) of the nation's nearly 8 million unemployed for April are ages 16 to 34 – even though that group makes up just over a third of the civilian labor force.

The share of wage and salary workers in the U.S. who belong to labor unions has fallen by about half since 1983. Americans express mixed views on the impact this long-term decline has had on the country.