Evelyn Reynolds

Government data from November showed job openings remained high, with rates of quitting and layoffs holding steady.The labor market remained a key source of strength for households and the overall economy ahead of the holiday season, even as hiring struggles remained a headache for employers, the latest government data indicates.The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday that there were 10.5 million U.S. job openings on the last day of November, a figure little changed from the month before. The number of workers voluntarily quitting their jobs ticked up slightly, and layoffs were comparable to the previous month.According to the bureau’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, there were 1.7 open jobs for every unemployed worker near the end of 2022. Some experts caution that the vacancy rate should be taken with a grain of salt, since many employers may no longer be urgently recruiting, yet don’t see the harm in leaving a job listing posted online in case the right candidate comes along.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Retirees: About 3.5 million people are missing from the U.S. labor force. A large number of them, roughly two million, have simply retired.Switching Jobs: A hallmark of the pandemic era has been the surge in employee turnover. The wave of job-switching may be taking a toll on productivity.Delivery Workers: Food app services are warning that a proposed wage increase for New York City workers could mean higher delivery costs.A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?: Employees seeking wage increases to cover their costs of living amid rising prices could set off a cycle in which fast inflation today begets fast inflation tomorrow.The JOLTS release is what economists call a lagging indicator, telling more about recent conditions in the business cycle rather than about what might come next. Most economists expect layoffs to increase and the economy to slouch, with fewer job postings. But the persistence of vacancies in November underlines commentary from small businesses leaders and Fortune 500 chief executives alike, lamenting a dearth of talent to fill openings.“The people shortage is systemic, and it’s fundamentally changing how businesses should prepare for economic slowdowns,” argued Ron Hetrick, a senior economist at Lightcast, a labor market analytics firm. “If the U.S. does see some sort of recession in 2023, it will be less about persistent worker displacement and more about employers finally being able to fill the roles they’ve had open for the past several years.”Baby boomers are retiring. And with political gridlock set to pick up in Washington, some federal legislative proposals intended to expand the labor pool — like immigration reform or an expansion of child care support — are unlikely to become law anytime soon.As inflation from sources like supply chain snags has cooled, policymakers and influential economic commentators have dedicated a larger share of their discussions to concerns about a labor market that in their view is “overheated,” or too strong for the overall good.In his most recent news conference, Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, emphasized that the central bank was focused on bringing all dimensions of the economy, including the job market, into “better alignment” in an effort to slow price increases.“We do see a very, very strong labor market, one where we haven’t seen much softening, where job growth is very high, where wages are very high, vacancies are quite elevated and, really, there’s an imbalance in the labor market between supply and demand,” he said. “So that part of it, which is the biggest part, is likely to take a substantial period to get down.”For roughly two years, millions of workers gained an unfamiliar degree of leverage as their talent became more valued or scarce, and they began quitting or bargaining for higher wages in greater numbers. That trend has been a lingering source of anxiety for a variety of business owners, who have had to contend with inflation, much like their customers, while balancing higher labor costs with their profit goals.In November, the rate of workers voluntarily quitting jumped notably for establishments with fewer than 10 employees, potentially further evidence of how small-scale entrepreneurs are struggling to compete with bigger businesses to attract talent. More

Central bankers remained committed to wrestling inflation lower, and wanted to make sure investors understood that message, minutes from the Federal Reserve’s December meeting showed.Federal Reserve officials worried that inflation could remain uncomfortably fast, minutes from their December meeting showed, and some policymakers fretted that financial markets might incorrectly interpret their decision to raise interest rates more slowly as a sign that they were giving up the fight against America’s rapid price gains.Inflation is beginning to slow down but remains abnormally quick: The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index climbed by 5.5 percent over the year through November, down from a 7 percent peak in June but still nearly triple the Fed’s 2 percent inflation goal. Fed officials still saw inflation as unacceptably high at their meeting last month — and worried that rapid price gains might have staying power.“The risks to the inflation outlook remained tilted to the upside,” Fed officials warned during their December policy meeting, minutes released on Wednesday showed. “Participants cited the possibility that price pressures could prove to be more persistent than anticipated, due to, for example, the labor market staying tight for longer than anticipated.”Such risks set up a challenging year for Fed policymakers, who will need to decide how much more they need to raise interest rates — and how long they need to hold them at elevated levels — to bring inflation firmly under control. The Fed wants to avoid pulling back too early, which could allow inflation to become entrenched in the economy. But officials are also conscious that high rates come at a cost: As they slow growth and weaken the labor market, workers are likely to earn less and may even lose their jobs.That’s why the Fed wants to tread carefully, bringing price increases under control without inflicting more damage than necessary. Officials slowed their rate increases last month, lifting their main policy rate by half a point after several three-quarter-point moves in 2022. Officials forecast that they would raise rates by more in 2023, but their estimates suggested that they were nearing the level at which they might pause: They saw rates climbing to about 5.1 percent in 2023, from about 4.4 percent now.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

Neel Kashkari, the president of the Minneapolis Fed, kicked off 2023 monetary policy debates with a call for better understanding of what causes inflation.A Federal Reserve official compared inflation to Uber surge pricing on Wednesday in the first formal monetary policy remarks of 2023, kicking off what promises to be a contentious year of debate about how fast price increases will fade and how aggressive America’s central bank needs to be in counteracting them.Neel Kashkari, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and one of the 12 officials with a vote on monetary policy this year, published an essay on monetary policy and the inflation surge in 2021 and 2022. Consumer price increases were as high as 9 percent last year, and remain above 7 percent according to the latest data.But the price pop was driven by a combination of high demand and supply constrained by outside shocks — mainly the pandemic and the war in Ukraine — rather than by wages and shifting expectations traditionally thought to drive lasting inflation. It is easy to think of the burst in terms of ride-share surge pricing, Mr. Kashkari said: Prices jumped, profits increased, and wages picked up, but there just wasn’t enough supply to bring the market into balance.“Our models seem ill equipped to handle a fundamentally different source of inflation, specifically, in this case, surge pricing inflation,” Mr. Kashkari wrote. He added that “even if we had been able to identify all the shocks in advance, I don’t think our workhorse models would have come anywhere close to forecasting 7 percent inflation.”The implication, Mr. Kashkari noted, is that the Fed needs to deepen its “analytical capabilities surrounding other sources and channels of inflation” outside of expectations and wage growth.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

Demand for employment remained high in November as companies looked for workers to fill positions despite worries of a looming recession, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.
The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey for the month showed available positions at 10.46 million, down just fractionally from October’s total and above the 10 million forecast by FactSet. The JOLTS survey is closely watched by Federal Reserve officials for signs of labor market slack.

As a share of the labor force, job openings remained at 6.4%, indicating demand for workers is still high despite the Fed’s efforts to cool the economy and bring down inflation, which has been driven partially by rising wages.
A separate data point Wednesday showed that the U.S. manufacturing sector contracted for the second consecutive month. The ISM Manufacturing Index for December came in at 48.4%, representing the percentage of companies showing expansion. That was about in line with the 48.5% estimate from Dow Jones. A reading below 50% indicates contraction.
On the jobs front, the JOLTS report showed a slight decrease in hiring and a bit of an increase in layoffs. However, the report had little indication of substantial labor market softening.
The quits level increased by 126,000, which took the rate up one-tenth of a percentage point to 2.7%, for a reading that is indicative of worker confidence that they can leave their jobs and find other employment.
Open positions outnumbered available workers by about 1.7 to 1.

The ISM report also showed that the labor market for the manufacturing sector is solid. The jobs index component of the reading rose 3 points to 51.4. At the same time, the prices index, a gauge of inflation, declined to 39.4, a drop of 3.6 points.
Markets will be watching later in the week for the Labor Department’s nonfarm payrolls report, which is expected to show a gain of 200,000 jobs.

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Hidekazu Yokoyama has spent three decades building a thriving logistics business on Japan’s snowy northern island of Hokkaido, an area that provides much of the country’s milk.Last year, he decided to give it all away.It was a radical solution for a problem that has become increasingly common in Japan, the world’s grayest society. As the country’s birthrate has plummeted and its population has grown older, the average age of business owners has risen to around 62. Nearly 60 percent of the country’s businesses report that they have no plan for what comes next.While Mr. Yokoyama, 73, felt too old to carry on much longer, quitting wasn’t an option: Too many farmers had come to depend on his company. “I definitely couldn’t abandon the business,” he said. But his children weren’t interested in running it. Neither were his employees. And few potential owners wanted to move to the remote, frozen north.So he placed a notice with a service that helps small-business owners in far-flung locales find someone to take over. The advertised sale price: zero yen.Mr. Yokoyama’s struggle symbolizes one of the most potentially devastating economic impacts of Japan’s aging society. It is inevitable that many small- and medium-size companies will go out of business as the population shrinks, but policymakers fear that the country could be hit by a surge in closures as aging owners retire en masse.In an apocalyptic 2019 presentation, Japan’s trade ministry projected that by 2025, around 630,000 profitable businesses could close up shop, costing the economy $165 billion and as many as 6.5 million jobs.Economic growth is already anemic, and the Japanese authorities have sprung into action in hopes of averting a catastrophe. Government offices have embarked on public relations campaigns to educate aging owners about options for continuing their businesses beyond their retirements and have set up service centers to help them find buyers. To sweeten the pot, the authorities have introduced large subsidies and tax breaks for new owners.Still, the challenges remain formidable. One of the biggest obstacles to finding a successor has been tradition, said Tsuneo Watanabe, a director of Nihon M&A Center, a company that specializes in finding buyers for valuable small- and medium-size enterprises. The company, founded in 1991, has become enormously lucrative, recording $359 million in revenue last year.Mr. Yokoyama plans to give away his land and equipment to a successor he has chosen.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesOne of Mr. Yokoyama’s workers.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesBut building that business has been a long process. In years past, small-business owners, particularly those who ran the country’s many decades- or even centuries-old companies, assumed that their children or a trusted employee would take over. They had no interest in selling their life’s work to a stranger, much less a competitor.More on Social Security and RetirementEarning Income After Retiring: Collecting Social Security while working can get complicated. Here are some key things to remember.An Uptick in Elder Poverty: Older Americans didn’t fare as well through the pandemic. But longer-term trends aren’t moving in their favor, either.Medicare Costs: Low-income Americans on Medicare can get assistance paying their premiums and other expenses. This is how to apply.Claiming Social Security: Looking to make the most of this benefit? These online tools can help you figure out your income needs and when to file.Mergers and acquisitions “weren’t well regarded. A lot of people felt that it was better to shut the company down than sell it,” Mr. Watanabe said. Perceptions of the industry have improved over the years, but there are “still many businesspeople who aren’t even aware that M&A is an option,” he added.While the market has found buyers for the businesses most ripe for the picking, it can seem nearly impossible for many small but economically vital companies to find someone to take over.In 2021, government help centers and the top five merger-and-acquisitions services found buyers for only 2,413 businesses, according to Japan’s trade ministry. Another 44,000 were abandoned. Over 55 percent of those were still profitable when they closed.Many of those businesses were in small towns and cities, where the succession problem is a potentially existential threat. The collapse of a business, whether a major local employer or a village’s only grocery store, can make it even harder for those places to survive the constant attrition of aging populations and urban flight that is hollowing out the countryside.After a government-run matching program failed to find someone to take over for Mr. Yokoyama, a bank suggested that he turn to Relay, a company based in Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island.Hay stored in a warehouse on the Yokoyama land.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesAn abandoned cowshed.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesRelay has differentiated itself by appealing to potential buyers’ sense of community and purpose. Its listings, featuring beaming proprietors in front of sushi shops and bucolic fields, are engineered to appeal to harried urbanites dreaming of a different lifestyle.The company’s task in Mr. Yokoyama’s case wasn’t easy. For most Japanese, the town where his business is situated, Monbetsu, which has around 20,000 people and is shrinking, might as well be the North Pole. The only industries are fishing and farming, and they largely go into hibernation as the days grow short and snow piles up to roof eaves. In deep winter, some tourists come to eat salmon roe and scallops and see the ice floes that lock in the city’s modest port.A street full of 1980s-era cabarets and restaurants is a snapshot of a more prosperous time when young fishermen gathered to let off steam and spend big paychecks. Today, faded posters peel off abandoned storefronts. The town’s biggest building is a new hospital.In 2001, Monbetsu constructed a new elementary school building just around the corner from Mr. Yokoyama’s company. It closed after just 10 years.In times past, the classrooms would have been filled with the grandchildren of local dairy farmers. But their own children have now mostly moved to cities in search of higher-paying, less onerous work.With no obvious successors, the farms have folded one after another. Decades-high inflation brought on by the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine has pushed dozens of holdouts into early retirement.Mr. Yokoyama’s employees are skeptical about his succession plan.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesThe workers are mostly in their 50s and 60s.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesAs local farmers have aged and their profits thinned, more of them have come to depend on Mr. Yokoyama for tasks like harvesting hay and clearing snow. His days start at 4 a.m. and end at 7 in the evening. He sleeps in a small room behind his office.It would be “extremely difficult” if his business folded, said Isao Ikeno, the manager of a nearby dairy cooperative that has turned heavily to automation as workers have become harder to find.On the cooperative’s farm, 17 employees tend to 3,000 head of cattle, and Mr. Yokoyama’s company fills in the gaps. No other area businesses can provide the services, Mr. Ikeno said.Mr. Yokoyama began contemplating retirement about six years ago. But it wasn’t clear what would happen to the business.While he had taken on a little over half a million dollars in debt, years of generous economic stimulus policies have kept interest rates at rock bottom, easing the burden, and the company’s annual profit margin was around 30 percent.The ad he placed on Relay acknowledged that the job was hard, but it said that no experience was needed. The best candidate would be “young and ready to work.”Whoever was chosen would take over the debts, but also inherit all of the business’s equipment and nearly 150 acres of prime farmland and forest. Mr. Yokoyama’s children will get nothing.“I told them that if you want to take it over, I’d leave it to you, but if you don’t want to do it, I’m giving it all to the next guy,” he said.Thirty inquiries poured in. Among those who expressed interest were a couple and a representative of a company that planned to expand. Mr. Yokoyama settled on a dark horse, 26-year-old Kai Fujisawa.A friend had showed Mr. Fujisawa the ad on Relay, and Mr. Fujisawa immediately jumped in a car and showed up on Mr. Yokoyama’s doorstep, impressing him with his youth and enthusiasm.Kai Fujisawa, Mr. Yokoyama’s potential successor.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesStill, the transition hasn’t been smooth. Mr. Yokoyama is not entirely convinced that Mr. Fujisawa is the right person for the job. The learning curve is steeper than either of them had imagined, and Mr. Yokoyama’s grizzled, chain-smoking employees are skeptical that Mr. Fujisawa will be able to live up to the boss’s reputation.Most of the company’s 17 employees are in their 50s and 60s, and it’s not clear where Mr. Fujisawa will find people to replace them as they retire.“There’s a lot of pressure,” Mr. Fujisawa said. But “when I came here, I was prepared to do this for the rest of my life.” More

The world has relied on ultralow interest rates in Japan. What will happen if they rise?Japan is the world’s largest creditor. At the end of 2021, it held roughly $3.2 trillion in foreign assets, 30 percent more than No. 2 Germany. As of October, it owned over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt, more than China. Japanese banks are the world’s largest cross-border lenders, with nearly $4.8 trillion in claims in other countries.Late last month, the world got an unexpected reminder of how integral Japan is to the global economy, when the country’s central bank unexpectedly announced that it was adjusting its stance on bond purchases.To those unversed in the intricacies of monetary policy, the significance of Japan’s decision to raise the ceiling on its 10-year bond yields may not have been immediately clear. But for the finance industry, the surprising change raised expectations that the days of rock-bottom Japanese interest rates could be numbered — potentially further squeezing global credit markets that were already tightening as the world economy slows.Since this summer, the Bank of Japan has been an outlier, keeping its interest rates ultralow even as other central banks raced to keep up with the Federal Reserve, which has ratcheted up lending costs in an effort to tame high inflation.As global rates have diverged from those in Japan, the value of the yen has fallen as investors sought better returns elsewhere. That has put pressure on the Bank of Japan to shift the world’s third-largest economy away from its decade-long commitment to cheap money, a policy known as monetary easing.Japan’s deep integration into global financial networks means that there is a lot of money riding on the timing of any move away from that policy, and investors have spent years fruitlessly waiting for a sign.As of mid-December, the overwhelming expectation was that the bank would hold off on any changes until next spring, when Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan’s governor and an architect of its current policies, is set to step down.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

The rise in turnover since the pandemic started has a cost in productivity: “It’s taking longer to get stuff out the door.”One after another, employees at the New Hampshire manufacturer W.H. Bagshaw said goodbye.One went to a robotics company in nearby Boston. Another became an electrician’s apprentice. In all, 22 workers have left W.H. Bagshaw in the past two years — no small matter for a company that has a work force of fewer than 50. That level of departures was also far from normal: In 2019, the company lost just one or two employees; the turnover rate in 2022 was over 30 percent.W.H. Bagshaw, which makes precision machined parts for the aerospace and medical industries, was mostly able to replace the workers who left — but at a cost. Hiring employees and bringing them up to speed could include teaching them how to operate complex, multi-axis turning machines. That took time and energy, preventing the company from running at full capacity.Production slowed. The number of on-time deliveries to customers slipped.“It’s taking longer to get stuff out the door,” said Adria Bagshaw, the company’s vice president.A hallmark of the pandemic era has been the surge in employee turnover. Since 2021, an extraordinary number of Americans have been quitting their jobs — some flexing their power in a white-hot labor market, others re-evaluating their priorities amid a destabilizing pandemic.In November 2021, more than 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs, according to government data, the most in the two decades that the government has been keeping track. That number has slowly been declining in recent months, but it is still far higher than before the pandemic. The churn has been particularly high in low-wage sectors such as leisure and hospitality, where intense competition for labor led workers to pursue better-paying opportunities.All that turnover has taken a toll on productivity — for individual companies, and perhaps for the economy as well.Economists say the wave of job-switching could be one factor in the weak productivity growth that the U.S. economy has experienced in recent years. Early on, some experts expected the pandemic to unleash productivity by forcing companies to embrace new technologies and ways of working. Instead, productivity has fallen slightly over the past two years.“All that turnover, all that hiring, all that training you have to do — that takes away from your day job,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “So it’s essentially less output at the end of the day.”At W.H. Bagshaw, the perpetual need to train employees has been a central reason for the production slowdown.“Anytime we bring in a new hire, they’re not productive on Day 1 — usually they’re shadowing someone for a few weeks or months,” Ms. Bagshaw said. “You’re investing in someone for the future. Whoever is doing the training, they’re slowed down from their normal productivity.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Retirees: About 3.5 million people are missing from the U.S. labor force. A large number of them, roughly two million, have simply retired.Delivery Workers: Food app services are warning that a proposed wage increase for New York City workers could mean higher delivery costs.A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?: Employees seeking wage increases to cover their costs of living amid rising prices could set off a cycle in which fast inflation today begets fast inflation tomorrow.Disabled Workers: With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.Productivity — in its simplest form, the value of the goods and services that a typical employee can produce in an hour of work — is notoriously difficult to measure accurately. But it is one of the most important measures of the health of an economy, particularly during a period of rapid inflation. Productivity is what allows the economic pie to grow: If workers can produce more in the same amount of time, then their employers can afford to pay them more per hour without either raising prices or cutting into profits.When productivity stagnates, however, pay becomes a zero-sum game: If workers want to make more money, then the money has to come from somewhere else.“Really the issue at the heart of everything — from inflation to growth to companies and head count — it’s about productivity, and that turnover concern is huge,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist for ADP, a payroll processing firm.Sobeyda Rodriguez, a machine operator at W.H. Bagshaw in Nashua, N.H.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesW.H. Bagshaw makes parts for the aerospace and medical industries.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesIn the past two years, 22 workers have left W.H. Bagshaw, which has a work force of fewer than 50.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesOrdinarily, economists consider turnover good for productivity. A healthy amount of job-switching allows workers to find the most suitable jobs, and employers to find the employees who will be the best fit. Over time, the most productive firms — which can afford to pay the most — will tend to attract the most productive workers, lifting the economy as a whole. In the years before the pandemic, many economists fretted about the declining rate of turnover, which they worried was a sign of an increasingly stagnant, even ossifying labor market.But the impact of the Great Resignation is complicated: Too much turnover all at once can create its own problems.For nearly two years, companies have complained that they are caught in an unending cycle of hiring and training workers, only to see them leave in a matter of weeks or months. Constant recruiting and training drains management resources, and new hires often do not stick around long enough for that investment to pay off. Veteran employees are often asked to pick up the slack, leading to burnout.These challenges have been on vivid display in the hospitality industry, which experienced much-higher-than-normal turnover rates in this period.“A lot of restaurants are in survival mode, and survival mode creates a vicious circle,” said Dominic Benvenuti, an owner of Boston Pie, which owns more than two dozen Domino’s locations in New England.Store managers can’t hire enough workers, Mr. Benvenuti said, so they demand too much from new employees too quickly, sending them out on deliveries or putting them to work in the kitchen without sufficient training. When those workers inevitably fail, they quit, compounding the labor shortage and continuing the cycle.“They are thrown into such chaos and stress that it overwhelms them, and they leave,” he said. “It is never-ending if someone doesn’t end it.”The solution, Mr. Benvenuti said, is to focus on training and to recognize that new hires won’t be as productive as 10-year veterans right away. But that is easier said than done when customers are calling to ask why their pizzas are late.There may be some relief in sight for businesses. The turnover rate has declined somewhat since its peak at the end of 2021, and many employers, both public and private, expect that trend to continue this year. That could give companies a chance to focus on tasks neglected during the pandemic chaos, like training employees and updating business processes.But some workplace experts say higher-than-normal turnover rates are likely to persist, particularly in white-collar industries where remote work has become more common. For employees who work from home some or all of the time, job hunting no longer requires manufacturing an excuse to be out of the office or worrying about a boss finding a résumé on the office printer.“It’s just easier to switch jobs now,” Ms. Richardson said. “Back in the old days, you had to meet at a Starbucks, and if you ran into another employee who was at that same Starbucks that was five blocks away from the closer Starbucks, you knew they were on a job interview.”Now, she said, “if you’re working from home, you can do a whole day’s interview from the comfort of your living room and no one’s the wiser.”Many economists say it is still possible that the pandemic-era increase in turnover will be beneficial for productivity, even if that isn’t the case yet. People who thrive working from home will gravitate toward companies that embrace remote work; people who do better in person will be snapped up by companies that require employees to come into the office. Industries that remade themselves to survive the pandemic — like restaurants, retailers and hotels — will figure out which changes will work in the long term, and which employees are well-suited to the new way of doing business.“You’re investing in someone for the future,” said Adria Bagshaw, W.H. Bagshaw’s vice president.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesThe pandemic’s disruption contributed to a surge in entrepreneurial activity, a key driver of the kind of innovation that could lead to a more productive economy. The dynamics have also spurred many companies to re-evaluate or adapt long-held practices to increase efficiency.“There’s an enormous amount of experimentation going on right now, and it’s showing up in so many different ways,” said John Haltiwanger, a University of Maryland economist who studies job turnover.“I think it will be healthy, but not immediately,” he added. “There’s a long-term payoff to this, but it could literally take years, not months, for this to kick in.”When Rahkeem Morris started the company HourWork several years ago, his goal was to help fast-food companies and other businesses hire more efficiently. But last year, the company pivoted to a new focus: retention.A fast-food worker typically takes six months to reach full productivity, Mr. Morris said, but at many companies, the typical employee in the industry leaves after just 75 days. HourWork now offers a service to help store owners keep in touch with staff members by text message and to analyze their responses to identify issues that could be causing employees to quit — an approach the company says can reduce turnover, particularly among new hires.Mr. Morris, who worked in fast food as a teenager before getting degrees from Cornell and Harvard Business School, said companies had long tried to deal with staffing shortages by focusing on recruitment. He likened that approach to trying to fill a leaky bucket — if companies do not also try to keep their workers, no amount of recruiting will solve their problem.The Great Resignation, however, may finally have led companies to rethink that approach.“We’re starting to see the tide shift and the sentiment around that change,” Mr. Morris said. “Fixing the leaky-bucket problem will get these restaurants to full productivity.” More

Public sympathy for striking nurses and other health workers is particularly strong, posing a challenge for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has promised to confront trade unions.The winter holiday season across most of Britain ends on Tuesday, but the return to work for millions of Britons comes on the same day as yet another train strike, promising a commute as unpredictable as the country’s increasingly erratic rail network.Britain begins the new year just as it ended the old one, in the middle of a wave of labor unrest that has involved as many as 1.5 million workers so far, concentrated in the public sector and formerly state-owned businesses. Nurses in England, Northern Ireland and Wales walked out twice last month; ambulance crews have staged their largest work stoppage in decades; and border agents, postal staff and garbage collectors have taken similar action in a “winter of discontent.”With wages lagging galloping inflation, many, including nurses, plan to stop work again this month, leading some British news outlets to raise fears of a de facto general strike that could bring the country to a grinding halt.Yet while months of disruption have eroded some sympathy for rail workers, with the public roughly split over train strikes, support for health workers, whose tireless efforts during the coronavirus pandemic were widely lauded as heroic, remains buoyant.“January will be the test: Will the British public shift?” said Steven Fielding, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. He added that while further rail strikes might prompt a long-predicted backlash against the unions, “It’s remarkable how much it hasn’t happened.”Sympathy for strikes by nurses and ambulance workers has been stoked by a sense than Britain’s National Health Service is overwhelmed.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesThat is not for want of effort by Britain’s conservative tabloids. One newspaper nicknamed Mick Lynch, the combative leader of a rail union, “The Grinch,” accusing him of wrecking Christmas, spoiling office parties and hampering family reunions. In the city of Bristol, one pub canceled a rail workers’ Christmas party in retaliation for strikes thought to have hurt the hospitality trade.But in general, support for the strikers has stayed strong, according to a YouGov opinion poll last month, which showed 66 percent of respondents supported striking nurses and 28 percent opposed them, 58 favoring firefighters with 33 against, and 43 percent in favor of rail workers with 49 opposed. Another poll, by Savanta ComRes, found the same percentage in support of further rail strikes, but only 36 percent opposed.Even many Britons who support the governing Conservative Party say they believe that health workers have a case, a reflection both of the popularity of the country’s National Health Service and concerns about its ability to cope with huge pressures. And, underscoring a growing sense of malaise, another poll recorded a majority agreeing with the statement that “nothing in Britain works anymore.”That may pose a challenge for Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who insists that agreeing to raises could embed inflation, which he sees as the real enemy of working people. Instead, he promises new, and as yet unspecified, laws to restrict labor unrest, while critics of trade unions argue rail workers are risking their futures as commuters stay away from a network already suffering from the growth of working from home.“It’s difficult for everybody because inflation is where it is, and the best way to help them and everyone else in the country is for us to get a grip and reduce inflation as quickly as possible,” Mr. Sunak told a parliamentary committee in December, when asked about the plight of striking workers.Nurses striking in London last month. A poll last month found 66 percent of respondents in favor of the strike, with 28 percent opposed.Maja Smiejkowska/ReutersNews reports suggest that an agreement to end the rolling series of rail strikes could be close, but despite holding the purse strings over the employers of rail staff, the government has resisted direct involvement in negotiations.The wave of strikes comes amid Britain’s cost-of-living crisis and follows years of constrained public spending, and unions say they are responding to a decade of neglect of vital services.“I think the fact that this comes after 10 to 12 years of austerity has affected the public mood and is maybe what’s helping the unions and their members not to lose public support,” said Peter Kellner, a polling expert. “The evidence so far is that public opinion hasn’t materially shifted. I don’t see any particular reason why it should, especially with the health service,” he added.At King’s Cross Station in London last week, there were certainly signs of annoyance among commuters at the disrupted services.“Most of the time my train is canceled or delayed,” said Daisy Smith, an airline worker from London who was waiting to travel to York, about two hours north of the capital. “It is ridiculous that they are on strike.”King’s Cross Station in London last week. Britons have long found their train service unreliable.Hollie Adams/Getty ImagesBut Ms. Smith said she sympathized with the strikers, believed they deserved a pay rise and was frustrated by the standoff. “The government needs to do something about it,” she said, adding that the dispute had been allowed to fester for months.Andrew Allonby, a public-sector worker who was traveling home to Newcastle, in northeast England, said he, too, supported the strikers.“I know there is no money around, but there has got to be a line,” he said, referring to reports that some health workers were relying on donated groceries. “Nurses having to go to food banks is ridiculous.”Public sympathy is being driven by a widespread feeling that the health system is understaffed and overwhelmed. One senior doctor made headlines by warning that as many as 500 patients a week could be dying because of long delays in emergency rooms across the country. And on Monday the vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said many emergency departments were in a state of crisis.Pay levels for nurses are recommended by an independent body whose suggestion of a 4.3 percent increase, issued before much of last year’s inflation was evident, had been accepted by the government.That is well short of the 19 percent demanded by nurses, but ministers have refused to budge, pointing to a 3 percent annual raise for nurses in 2021, when the pay of many others was frozen for the year.Britain’s health secretary, Steve Barclay, raised hackles last month by saying that striking ambulance unions had made a “conscious choice to inflict harm on patients” — a statement described by Sharon Graham, general secretary of the union Unite, as a “blatant lie.”Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised new laws to restrict labor unrest.Kin Cheung/Associated PressMark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, told the broadcaster Sky News, “We have had 10 years where our pay has not kept pace with inflation.” He added that 40,000 government staff members used food banks and that 45,000 of them were so poor they had to claim welfare payments.Dawn Poole, a striking border force officer at London’s Heathrow International Airport and representative of the union, said that rising food and energy costs, combined with a hike in mortgage interest rates, had been the final straw for already-struggling staff.“We have had people selling houses to downsize or struggling to pay the rent,” she said. Mr. Sunak’s tough stance is a gamble. If the strikes collapse, that could build his reputation as a leader able to stand firm and administer tough measures to stabilize the economy. It could also bolster his leadership within a fractious Conservative Party, where standing up to trade unions is associated with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who came to power in 1979 after labor unrest also known as the winter of discontent and faced down striking miners.Mrs. Thatcher, however, prepared for her standoff with the miners, ensuring that coal stocks were high and confronting them at a time when unions were widely seen as too powerful.Inflation in Britain has been running at an annual rate of over 10 percent.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockBy contrast, today’s unions appear to be more in sync with the popular mood, analysts say, because Britons know that well before the strikes, their railways were unreliable and their health service was creaking under acute pressure.“The argument that ‘We’re on strike to save the National Health Service,’ which is what the nurses have been saying, resonates with what people know from their own experience,” said Professor Fielding.Mr. Kellner, the polling expert, said he believed that the government should separate the nurses and ambulance crews from other strikers.“As long as the health workers are on strike, the other unions have some degree of cover,” he said. “If in a month’s time we are where we are now, with nothing settled, I think the government will be in a really bad position.”In the meantime, rail travelers must decide whether to even try to head to the office this week. As one rail operator warned: “Until Jan. 8, only travel by train if absolutely necessary.” More