MILWAUKEE & SHEBOYGAN, Wis.—Milwaukee native Christopher Lane avoided some of the common pitfalls of his inner-city upbringing, but fell into others. Although his parents were married for most of his childhood, their conflict and repeated separation deeply affected him. He largely avoided drugs but spent more than 20 years behind bars for armed robberies in 1989 and 1993.

The City Council of Chicago voted Tuesday to establish a citywide minimum wage of $13 per hour by 2019. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat who faces reelection in February, has championed the increase as a poverty-fighting measure. But critics worry it will drive job-creating businesses out of town.

President Barack Obama continued to push for national paid maternity leave in a speech this week, but he hasn’t proposed any plans to achieve it. While his supporters cheer the idea, some economists warn that legally mandating maternity leave will have unintended consequences for women and working families.

The conversation is still all too vivid in my memory. It’s been more than 20 years, but it was a defining moment in my management career.

Friends were visiting WORLD magazine’s offices, and as part of our modest tour, I was showing them the warehouse where in those days we provided a mail order service for a number of good books, especially for children. The warehouse handled several hundred orders every day, and employed about 25 people.

In a Dec. 4 speech, President Obama declared income “inequality” to be “the defining challenge of our time.”

It is time for me to come clean; to own up to a dark secret I have been hiding most of my life. It is embarrassing to admit it, but I suffer from income inequality.

Yes, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people who make more money than I do and it has affected my life in ways too numerous to recount.

WASHINGTON (AP)—Weekly applications for U.S. unemployment benefits jumped 46,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted 388,000, the highest in four months. The increase represents a rebound from the previous week's sharp drop. Both swings were largely due to technical factors.

The four-week average of applications, a less volatile measure, rose slightly to 365,500, the Labor Department said Thursday. That is a level consistent with modest hiring.

WASHINGTON - Nothing said at either party's convention may have as much effect on the 2012 presidential election as the three job reports coming out before voters go to the polls on Nov. 6.

The first of those reports came out today, and the news wasn't good: The economy added only 96,000 jobs in the month of August, and the unemployment rate fell from 8.3 to 8.1 percent because 368,000 people stopped looking for work. To make matters worse, the Department of Labor said 41,000 fewer jobs were created in June and July than first estimated.