When Peace Corps was first proposed, some in Congress assumed that only men would be volunteers.
— Elaine Chao
It has long been said the only things in life that are certain are death and taxes. Automatic enrollment for insurance of 401k loans would add an additional certainty. Fewer Americans would suffer the unnecessary loss of retirement savings due to unanticipated and untimely misfortune in an already stressful time of need.
Even when America's economy has been by all measures healthy and the unemployment rate low, some businesses suffer or fail and lay off workers. But nearly always, a simultaneous and even greater burst of new jobs has been created to offset the jobs lost - millions of new jobs every year.
In normal times, laid-off workers are unemployed an average of eight weeks.
We have a lot of employers who are looking for skilled workers and not being able to find them. And we have workers who lack the requisite skills to access these good-paying jobs in high growth industries.
I will carry with me always the deep sense of what it feels like to be an outsider and how tough it was, how hard it was to adapt to this country.
For any trade deal to move forward, there has to be agreement.
Progress is being made, but a lot of women are realizing it is not what they envisioned.
As I looked up at the Statue of Liberty, I thought at that time, 'What a wonderful country.'
I am not seeking any position in a Dole Administration.
I can tell you I love California - and no more.
We're a robust democracy here. That's the wonderful thing about this country.
Outside of Washington, D.C., most Americans aren't concerned with doing things 'big.' They're looking for less government spending, lower taxes, and good jobs.
Typically, after moving backwards, the economy takes even more steps forward.
Our country needs to produce 250,000 net new jobs every month just to keep even with population growth.
We have many rules and regulations that can be sometimes confusing and complicated. By reaching out to the employer community and educating them on what their responsibilities and obligations are to their work force, that, along, with strong enforcement, is the best way to protect workers.
Nan Gorman was born in Memphis, Tenn., on St. Patrick's Day. She moved to Hazard in 1929 when her father, James Hagan, a recent medical school graduate and aspiring surgeon, went to work there.
While conventional wisdom has traditionally sided against borrowing from retirement savings, sentiment has shifted toward borrowing from one's own assets with the realization that other forms of credit come at a much higher cost and often are not even available to borrowers with limited means and urgent needs.
In the best of years, millions of jobs are lost.
I love working in the garden.
What out country is facing right now is a skills gap.
My parents were very supportive.
We are a Republic with different branches of government, and so the Senate and the House are going to be full partners in working with the White House.
The ingenuity and creativity of the private sector is essential to meeting American's needs for a skilled work force.
When my mother, sisters and I arrived on the shores of America when I was 8 years old, the boat on which we came, a freighter, passed the Statue of Liberty.
My first port of call was Los Angeles. That's where I laid my first foot on America.
When there's change, people are always anxious.
I know what it is like to feel vulnerable and fearful during a difficult time.
Our private-sector work force is the most industrious, innovative, productive, and ambitious in the world.
In campaigns, lots of things will be said, and what they have said about my husband is just simply not true.
My husband has an outstanding record in promoting opportunity for women and the women that he surrounds himself in his staff and the women that he has promoted throughout his career. He's the father of three daughters. He's obviously a husband who's been very supportive of a very active wife with her own career.
Deep in the heart of Kentucky's rugged Eastern Mountain region, there lives a woman who has fascinated and inspired me for two decades. She is known locally these days as 'Mayor Nan' - the octogenarian chief executive of Hazard and advocate for its 5,467 residents.
401k savings accounts have become so important in the landscape of retirement planning that their security and expansion became a top priority in formulating and implementing the Pension Protection Act of 2006 that was enacted during my tenure as the U.S. Secretary of Labor.
Washington policymakers have to understand the adverse implications of their actions on job creation, and they must reorder some of their priorities.
The majority of the new jobs being created require higher skills, more education.
My parents were very, very strict parents, and they were not used to this new, you know, American custom of letting your children sleep in someone else's house.
I know that some people, when they are growing up and they - as a person of color in a majority community - that they may feel as if they are left out, or they feel a bit strange.
We need fair and free trade.
Even if it's a national issue, the federal government cannot provide all the answers.
Every person - we want to make sure that every person who wants a job will indeed get one.
Those memories of living in a developing nation are part of who I am today and give me a profound understanding of the challenges of economic development - an understanding which will make my tenure as Peace Corps director, I hope, a very special one.
People can voice their different points of view. We are also a country where there will be criticism.
We want to make sure that workers know their rights and that employers know their obligations. That is the best way to protect workers.
It's not coincidental that America's vigorous recovery in the early 1980s was led by a president who worked hard to unshackle growth in the private sector.
If we did not have Obamacare, we could've addressed the healthcare crisis in a comprehensive but segmented fashion - meaning that we could have promoted a health savings plan. We could've pushed for tort reform, which added so much more cost to healthcare.
I'm the first secretary of labor in the 21st century, and the competitiveness of the American work force and the modernization of decades-old regulations have been among our top priorities.
