Evelyn Reynolds

Weekly jobless claims totaled 184,000 for the week ended April 16, slightly above the previous week and a bit higher than the estimate.
Continuing claims hit their lowest level since Feb. 21, 1970.
A separate report showed that manufacturing activity in the Philadelphia area increased less than expected in April.

Initial jobless claims last week were a bit higher than expected but still reflective of a labor market where employers are loathe to fire workers.
First-time claims for benefits in the week ended April 16 totaled 184,000, a decline of 2,000 from the previous week but just ahead of the Dow Jones estimate for 182,000, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

The numbers indicate the U.S. employment picture remains historically tight as job openings outnumber the available labor pool by about 5 million.
Continuing claims, which run a week behind the headline number, fell by 58,000 to 1.417 million, the lowest level since Feb. 21, 1970.
A separate economic report Thursday showed that manufacturing expanded in the Philadelphia area in April, but at a slower pace than expected.
The Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s monthly manufacturing index registered a 17.6 reading, representing the difference between companies seeing expansion versus contraction. That was a decline of nearly 10 points from March and below the Dow Jones estimate of 21.9.
Measures of new orders, shipments, unfilled orders, delivery times and the average employee workweek showed declines from March. However, prices paid and prices received both increased, reflecting continued inflation pressures, while the number of employees index also gained.

On Wednesday, the Fed’s “Beige Book” summary of economic conditions around the U.S. noted the difficulty companies are having finding workers.
“Demand for workers continued to be strong across most Districts and industry sectors. But hiring was held back by the overall lack of available workers, though several Districts reported signs of modest improvement in worker availability,” the report said. “Many firms reported significant turnover as workers left for higher wages and more flexible job schedules.”
Fed officials are responding to the inflation surge with an expected series of interest rate hikes that they hope won’t derail the 2-year-old economic recovery. Markets expect the central bank’s benchmark overnight borrowing rate to rise to about 2.5% this year from near zero where it stood at the outset of 2022.
The jobless claims numbers reflect the continued progress in hiring. The total of those receiving benefits dropped to 1.62 million, as of data through April 2. A year ago, that total was 17.4 million, a number pared as the government has restricted extended unemployment benefits and as hiring accelerated following the release of Covid vaccines and a sharp drop in virus cases.
Still, the labor market hasn’t quite caught up to its pre-pandemic self.
Even though the unemployment rate has fallen to 3.6%, there are 408,000 fewer Americans working than in February 2020, just before the pandemic hit. The labor market also is smaller by 174,000 and the labor force participation rate is a full percentage point below its pre-Covid level.

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Employees at an Apple store in Atlanta filed a petition on Wednesday to hold a union election. If successful, the workers could form the first union at an Apple retail store in the United States.The move continues a recent trend of service-sector unionization in which unions have won elections at Starbucks, Amazon and REI locations.The workers are hoping to join the Communications Workers of America, which represents workers at companies like AT&T Mobility and Verizon, and has made a concerted push into the tech sector in recent years.The union says that about 100 workers at the store — at Cumberland Mall, in northwest Atlanta — are eligible to vote, including salespeople and repair technicians, and that over 70 percent of them have signed authorization cards indicating their support.In a statement, the union said Apple, like other tech employers, had effectively created a tiered work force that denied retail workers the pay, benefits and respect that workers earned at its corporate offices.Workers said they loved working at Apple but sometimes felt they were treated like second-class employees. “We want equal to what corporate actually gets,” said Sydney Rhodes, an employee at the store who is involved in the union campaign.Ms. Rhodes, who has worked at Apple for four years, said that she and many of her co-workers hoped to continue working for Apple for years to come but that it was often unclear how they could progress within the company. “Another reason why we’re working toward this union is for a more clear and concise way to grow, especially internally,” she added.An Apple spokesman said the company offered strong benefits, including health care coverage, tuition reimbursement and paid family leave, and a minimum pay rate of $20 per hour for retail workers.“We are fortunate to have incredible retail team members, and we deeply value everything they bring to Apple,” the spokesman said, but declined to comment on the union effort. The company would not say whether it would recognize the union voluntarily.Officials at the National Labor Relations Board will next determine whether there is sufficient interest among workers to hold an election — the bar is officially 30 percent — and set the terms for a potential vote. Both the union and the employer will have an opportunity to weigh in on the details, including the universe of employees eligible to take part and whether the vote should occur by mail or in person.Other unions, most notably Workers United, an affiliate of the giant Service Employees International Union that has led the organizing campaign at Starbucks, are also seeking to unionize Apple retail workers, of which there are tens of thousands in the United States.Workers at an Apple Store at Grand Central Terminal in New York City have begun to sign authorization cards that could lead to a filing for a union vote that would allow them to join Workers United. The move was reported over the weekend by The Washington Post.Activism and labor organizing at Apple have been building since last summer, when discontent over the company’s plan to require employees to return to the office snowballed into a broader movement, called #AppleToo. That movement aimed to highlight workplace problems like harassment, unequal pay and what workers described as a culture of secrecy that pervaded the company.“Apple workers across every line of business and around the world are using their voices to demand better treatment,” Janneke Parrish, one of the #AppleToo leaders, said of the union effort. Ms. Parrish has said Apple fired her in retaliation for her organizing. “I’m so happy to see workers taking this big step to stand up for their rights,” she said. Apple has disputed Ms. Parrish’s accusations.The #AppleToo movement included retail workers, who have said throughout the pandemic that Apple did not do enough to keep them safe from the coronavirus.Retail workers’ complaints escalated late last year when the Omicron variant spread rapidly throughout the country and at least 20 Apple stores had to close temporarily as a precaution or because so many of their workers had become infected that the stores could no longer operate. On Christmas Eve, several dozen Apple workers walked off their jobs to demand better pay and working conditions. Ms. Rhodes said that the effort at her store began in earnest last fall, and that her co-workers had taken encouragement from the union campaigns at companies like Starbucks and Amazon.Beyond its overtures at Apple, the communications workers union has had a presence at Google in recent years, helping workers form a so-called solidarity or minority union that enables them to coordinate actions without holding a union election and seeking certification from the labor board. Companies are not required to bargain with minority unions, as they are with more formal unions.The union also recently won a vote to represent about one dozen retail employees at Google Fiber stores in Kansas City, Mo., who are formally employed by a Google contractor. It is seeking to represent a few dozen Wisconsin-based quality assurance workers at the video-game maker Activision Blizzard, which Microsoft is acquiring, pending approval from regulators. More

San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly acknowledged that a series of rate hikes over the coming months could tip the economy into a recession.
The central bank official noted she doesn’t expect that to happen, and said any period of negative growth likely would be mild.

Mary Daly, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, poses after giving a speech on the U.S. economic outlook, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, November 12 2018.
Ann Saphir | Reuters

San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly acknowledged Wednesday that a near-certain series of interest rate hikes over the coming months could tip the economy into a shallow recession, though she noted that isn’t her expectation.
Responding to the worst inflation the U.S. has seen in more than 40 years, the central bank official said she foresees “an expeditious march” through the year toward benchmark interest rates that would neither stimulate nor repress growth — the “neutral” rate, in Fed parlance.

“Accounting for the risks of being too fast or too slow, I see an expeditious march to neutral by the end of the year as a prudent path,” she said.
The moves, Daly said, would help slow down an overheated economy that now has consumer price inflation running at an 8.5% annual pace.
She cited research from Princeton economist and former Fed vice chair Alan Blinder, who asserted that in 11 previous Fed hiking cycles, seven “were followed by a mild recession or none at all — basically a smooth landing,” she said in remarks at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. “Now, since I’m in Las Vegas, I will offer that I think those are pretty good odds.”
Asked later whether she considered a mild recession to be the equivalent of a soft landing or acceptable outcome, Daly said her outlook is for the economy to slow to “something that looks like below-trend growth, but not tip into negative territory, but could potentially tick into negative territory.”
That likely would mean a shallow recession, unlike those associated with, for instance, the financial crisis of 2008 or the stagflation days of the late 1970s and early ’80s, when then-Chairman Paul Volcker jacked up rates so much that the economy fell into a double-dip recession.

Some Wall Street economists see recession risks rising. Deutsche Bank recently said it sees a near-certainty of negative growth, while Goldman Sachs indicated about a 35% chance over the next two years.
“Recession is one word, but it describes a whole range of outcomes,” Daly said in response to a CNBC question. “It can be a couple of quarters of a tiny bit below zero. That’s a very different beast than something like the financial crisis or the Volcker disinflation period.”
“That’s not something that I’m forecasting or something I think would derail the long-run expansion,” she added.
Markets currently expect the Fed to enact a series of aggressive interest rate hikes between now and the end of the year. Following a 25 basis point, or quarter percentage point, increase in March, the expectation is a series of 50 basis point moves then a slowdown that will take the benchmark fed funds rate to about 2.5% by the end of the year, according to CME Group data.
Earlier in the day, Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said “I’m open to doing 50 basis point increases in order to front-load this a little bit.” St. Louis Fed President James Bullard on Monday said he’d like to move even faster and thinks a 75 basis point move next month would be appropriate, though traders are pricing in no chance of that happening.
For her part, Daly said she doesn’t want the Fed to slam on the brakes too quickly as that could endanger the pandemic-era recovery, which has been strong outside of the historic inflation move.
“If we ease on the brakes by methodically removing accommodation and regularly assessing how much more is needed, we have a good chance of transitioning smoothly and gliding the economy to its long-run sustainable path,” she said.

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Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic expressed concern about the impact that rate hikes could have on the U.S. economic recovery.
Bostic said the fed funds rate could be as low as 1.75%.

Atlanta Federal Reserve President Raphael Bostic on Tuesday expressed concern about the impact that rate hikes could have on the U.S. economic recovery, saying the central bank shouldn’t move so fast that it chokes off growth.
Bostic did not commit in a CNBC interview to what pace the Fed should take in increasing benchmark rates. Instead, he said policymakers should be measured in their approach and watch how what they do impacts conditions.

“I think I’m in the same areas as my colleagues philosophically,” he told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in a “Closing Bell” interview. “I think it’s really important that we get to neutral and do that in an expeditious way.”
“Neutral” is considered the rate at which the economy is running on its own with rates that are neither boosting nor restricting growth. Bostic said that neutral rate could be between 2% and 2.5% and the funds rate could be as low as 1.75% by the end of 2022. That puts him near the median of the Fed’s “dot plot” of individual members’ projections released each quarter.
“I really have us looking at one and three-quarters by the end of the year, but it could be slower depending on how the economy evolves and we do see greater weakening than I’m seeing in my baseline model,” he said. “This is one reason why I’m reluctant to really declare that we want to go a long way beyond our neutral place, because that may be more hikes than are warranted given sort of the economic environment.”
That puts him in contrast with some of the other Federal Open Market Committee members.
On Monday, St. Louis President James Bullard said he sees the fed funds rate, which serves as a benchmark for many consumer debt instruments, rising to 3.5%. He said the Fed needs to go beyond neutral if it has hopes of taming inflation running at its fastest pace in more than 40 years.

But Bostic said the Fed “needs to be cautious as we move forward.” Inflation could be topping, he said, though he noted that real incomes adjusted for the cost of living have been falling.
“We do need to get away from zero, I think zero is lower than we should be right now,” he said. “But at the same time, we need to just pay attention.”
Market pricing is for rate hikes that would bring the funds rate to 2.5% and the Fed ultimately hiking to around 3.2% before cutting rates in late 2024.
The Atlanta Fed is tracking GDP growth in the first quarter of just 1.3%, though Bostic said he expects the annual pace in 2022 to be around 3%.
“My goal is to have there not be a recession while I sit in this chair, and I’m just going to do all I can to make that be true,” he said.
Correction: Bostic said the neutral rate of interest is between 2-2.5% and the fed funds rate could be as low as 1.75%. An earlier version misstated his position on the neutral rate.

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The International Monetary Fund’s new World Economic Outlook expects growth to slow to 3.6 percent this year. The group is one of many to slash their forecasts recently.WASHINGTON — The world economy has entered a period of intense uncertainty as a capricious pandemic and the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine combine to fuel rapid inflation and weigh on an already fragile global recovery.These colliding challenges are confronting policymakers and central bankers in the United States and Europe as they seek to bring down inflation without slowing growth so much that their economies tip into recession.In the last week, international organizations and think tanks have begun slashing their forecasts for growth and trade as they assess the war’s disruptions to global energy, food and commodity supplies, as well as China’s sweeping lockdowns to contain a renewed coronavirus outbreak.The pall over the world economy was underscored on Tuesday by the International Monetary Fund, which said in its World Economic Outlook that global output was expected to slow this year to 3.6 percent, from 6.1 percent in 2021. That is a downgrade from a January forecast of 4.4 percent growth this year.“Global economic prospects have been severely set back, largely because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the I.M.F.’s chief economist, said at a news briefing on Tuesday. “This crisis unfolds as the global economy has not yet fully recovered from the pandemic.”The impact of Russia’s war on the global economy will be a central topic for policymakers convening in Washington this week for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.As the meetings got underway, policymakers grappled with how to maintain pressure on Russia while keeping the economic recovery on track and protecting the world’s poor from rising prices. While some countries that export commodities will benefit from a period of higher fuel and food prices, for most economies the disruptions weigh heavily.“The war has made an already dire situation worse,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a speech about rising food insecurity on Tuesday. “Price and supply shocks are already materializing, adding to global inflationary pressures, creating risks to external balances, and undermining the recovery from the pandemic.”On Wednesday, Ms. Yellen plans to attend an opening session that will include Ukraine’s finance minister as the United States looks to stand with allies in opposition to Russia’s invasion, a Treasury official said. However, Ms. Yellen will not attend some Group of 20 sessions, such as those on international financial architecture and sustainable finance, if Russians are participating.Against that backdrop, the I.M.F.’s new data revealed a daunting set of economic headwinds. Mr. Gourinchas said the war was slowing growth and spurring inflation, which he described as a “clear and present danger” for many countries. He added that disruptions to Russian supplies of oil, gas and metals, along with Ukrainian exports of wheat and corn, will ripple through commodities markets and across the global economy “like seismic waves.”He acknowledged that the trajectory of the global economy would depend on how the war proceeded and the ultimate breadth of the sanctions that the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia imposed on Russia.“Uncertainty around these projections is considerable, well beyond the usual range,” Mr. Gourinchas said. “Growth could slow down further while inflation could exceed our projections if, for instance, sanctions extend to Russian energy exports.”Ukraine and Russia are facing the most dire economic consequences from the war. The I.M.F. expects the Ukrainian economy to contract by 35 percent this year, while Russia’s economy is projected to shrink 8.5 percent. Mr. Gourinchas noted that the Russian authorities had so far managed to prevent a collapse of their financial system and avoided bank failures but said further sanctions targeting Russia’s energy industry could have a significant impact on its economy.The sweeping sanctions that America and its allies have already imposed on Russia are the main factor contributing to the downward revision of the I.M.F.’s global growth outlook, Mr. Gourinchas said. He added that a tightening of restrictions on Russian energy exports would be an “adverse scenario” that would further slow output around the world.Rising prices around the world show no signs of abating, the I.M.F. said, even if supply chain problems ease. It expects inflation to remain elevated throughout the year, projecting it at 5.7 percent in advanced economies and 8.7 percent in emerging markets. Inflation hit 8.5 percent in the United States last month, the fastest 12-month pace since 1981.An empty street in Shanghai this week. The World Bank warned that the lingering pandemic and Covid-19 lockdowns in China could amplify income inequality and poverty rates.Aly Song/ReutersOther international organizations and research groups have also pared back their global growth forecasts. Economists at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, expect global growth to decline from a rapid 5.8 percent in 2021 to 3.3 percent annually in 2022 and 2023.The World Bank also expressed alarm this week about the state of the global economy, warning that the lingering pandemic, Covid-19 lockdowns in China and higher inflation could amplify income inequality and poverty rates. It lowered its 2022 growth forecast to 3.2 percent from 4.1 percent.“I’m deeply concerned about developing countries,” David Malpass, the World Bank president, said on Monday. “They’re facing sudden price increases for energy, fertilizer and food, and the likelihood of interest rate increases. Each one hits them hard.”According to the Bank of International Settlements, more than half of emerging economies have inflation rates above 7 percent. And 60 percent of “advanced economies,” including the United States and the euro area, have inflation over 5 percent, the largest share since the 1980s, the bank said.In Britain, inflation climbed to 7 percent in March, the highest level in 30 years.An April 12 survey of global investors by BofA Securities found that more than two-thirds were pessimistic about global growth prospects in the months ahead.The Russia-Ukraine War and the Global EconomyCard 1 of 6Rising concerns. More

Builder confidence fell for the fourth straight month in April.
The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage stood at around 3.90% at the beginning of March, and is now up to 5.15%, according to Mortgage News Daily.
Elevated mortgage rates are only exacerbating high prices for both new and existing homes.

A contractor uses a hammer while working on townhouse under construction at the PulteGroup Metro housing development in Milpitas, California.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Sharply rising mortgage rates are taking their toll on the nation’s homebuilders, as already pricey new construction becomes even less affordable. 
Builder confidence in the market for new single-family homes fell 2 points to 77 in April, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. Any reading above 50 is considered positive sentiment, but the reading marks the fourth straight month of declines for the index, which stood at 83 in April 2021.

Of the index’s three components, current sales conditions fell 2 points to 85. Buyer traffic dropped 6 points to 60, and sales expectations in the next six months increased 3 points to 73 following a 10-point drop in March.

“Despite low existing inventory, builders report sales traffic and current sales conditions have declined to their lowest points since last summer as a sharp jump in mortgage rates and persistent supply chain disruptions continue to unsettle the housing market,” said NAHB Chairman Jerry Konter, a builder and developer from Savannah, Georgia.
The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage stood at around 3.90% at the beginning of March, and is now up to 5.15%, according to Mortgage News Daily. That is the highest rate in more than a decade. The rate loosely follows the yield on the U.S. 10-year Treasury, which has been on the rise, but is also being impacted as the Federal Reserve pulls out of the mortgage-backed bond market.
Elevated mortgage rates are only exacerbating high prices for both new and existing homes. The median price of a newly built home in February was up over 10% from the year prior.
“The housing market faces an inflection point as an unexpectedly quick rise in interest rates, rising home prices and escalating material costs have significantly decreased housing affordability conditions, particularly in the crucial entry-level market,” said NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz.
Regionally, on a three-month moving average, builder sentiment in the Northeast rose 1 point to a reading of 72. In the Midwest it fell 3 points to 69, in the South it fell 2 points to 82 and in the West it fell 1 point to 89.

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Mary Gundel loved managing a store in Tampa, Fla. But when she detailed its challenges on social media, the company — and fellow employees — took notice.In January 2021, Mary Gundel received a letter from Dollar General’s corporate office congratulating her for being one of the company’s top-performing employees. In honor of her hard work and dedication, the company gave Ms. Gundel a lapel pin that read, “DG: Top 5%.”“Wear it proudly,” the letter said.Ms. Gundel did just that, affixing the pin to her black-and-yellow Dollar General uniform, next to her name badge. “I wanted the world to see it,” she said.Ms. Gundel loved her job managing the Dollar General store in Tampa, Fla. It was fast-paced, unpredictable and even exciting. She especially liked the challenge of calming down belligerent customers and pursuing shoplifters. She earned about $51,000 a year, far more than the median income in Tampa.But the job had its challenges, too: Delivery trucks that would show up unannounced, leaving boxes piled up in the aisles because there weren’t enough workers to unpack them. Days spent running the store for long stretches by herself because the company allotted only so many hours for other employees to work. Cranky customers complaining about out of stock items.So on the morning of March 28, in between running the register and putting tags on clothing, Ms. Gundel, 33, propped up her iPhone and hit record.The result was a six-part critique, “Retail Store Manager Life,” in which Ms. Gundel laid bare the working conditions inside the fast-growing retail chain, with stores that are a common sight in rural areas. “Me talking out about this is actually kind of bad,” Ms. Gundel said as she looked into her camera. “Technically, I could get into a lot of trouble.”But she added: “Whatever happens, happens. Something needs to be said, and there needs to be some changes, or they are probably going to end up losing a lot of people.”Her videos, which she posted on TikTok, went viral, including one that has been viewed 1.8 million times.

@alwaysmrsgundel #corperateslavery #retail #dobetter #storemanagerlife #storemanagerlife ♬ original sound – ❤️AlwaysMrs.Gundel❤️ And with that, Ms. Gundel was instantly transformed from a loyal lieutenant in Dollar General management into an outspoken dissident who risked her career to describe working conditions familiar to retail employees across the United States.As Ms. Gundel had predicted, Dollar General soon fired her. She was let go less than a week after posting her first critical video, but not before she inspired other Dollar General store managers, many of them women working in stores in poor areas, to speak out on TikTok.“I am so tired I can’t even talk,” said one woman, who described herself as a 24-year-old store manager but did not give her name. “Give me my life back.”“I’ve been so afraid to post this until now,” another unidentified woman said, as she walked viewers through a Dollar General store while discussing how she was forced to work alone because of labor cuts.“This will be my last day,” she said, citing Ms. Gundel’s videos. “I am not doing this anymore.”In a statement, Dollar General said: “We provide many avenues for our teams to make their voices heard, including our open-door policy and routine engagement surveys. We use this feedback to help us identify and address concerns, improve our workplace and better serve our employees, customers and communities. We are disappointed any time an employee feels that we have not lived up to these goals and we use those situations as additional opportunities to listen and learn.“Although we do not agree with all the statements currently being made by Ms. Gundel, we are doing that here.”The store where Ms. Gundel worked. “You can only feel unappreciated for so long,” she said in an interview.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesBefore March 28, Ms. Gundel’s TikTok page was a mix of posts about hair extensions and her recent dental surgery. Now it is a daily digest dedicated to fomenting revolt at a major American company. She’s trying to build what she calls a “movement” of workers who feel overworked and disrespected and is encouraging Dollar General employees to form a union.Just about every day, Ms. Gundel announces on TikTok a newly “elected spokesperson” — each one a woman who works for Dollar General or worked there recently — from Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia and other places. These women have been assigned to answer questions and concerns from fellow employees in those states and most are keeping their identities hidden because they worry about losing their jobs.Social media not only gives workers a platform to vent and connect with one another, it empowers rank-and-file workers like Ms. Gundel to become labor leaders in the postpandemic workplace. Ms. Gundel’s viral videos appeared as Christian Smalls, an Amazon warehouse employee on Staten Island who was derided by the company as “not smart or articulate,” organized the first major union in Amazon history last month.Ms. Gundel — who often dyes her hair pink and purple and has long painted nails that she uses to slice open packaging at work — has been able to break through, it seems, because other workers see themselves in her.“Everyone has their breaking point,” she said in a telephone interview. “You can only feel unappreciated for so long.”Ms. Gundel planned on a long career at Dollar General when she started working in her first store in Georgia three years ago. She has three children, including one who is autistic, and her husband works at a defense contractor. She grew up in Titusville, Fla., near Cape Canaveral. Her mother was a district manager at the Waffle House restaurants. Her grandmother worked in the gift store at the Kennedy Space Center. Ms. Gundel moved to Tampa as a Dollar General store manager in February 2020, just before the pandemic.Two of the awards that Ms. Gundel received from Dollar General.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesTodd Anderson for The New York TimesThe store used to have about 198 hours a week to allocate to a staff of about seven people, she said. But by the end of last month, she had only about 130 hours to allocate, which equated to one full-time employee and one part-time employee fewer than when she started.With not as many hours to give to her staff, Ms. Gundel often had to operate the store on her own for long stretches, typically working six days and up to 60 hours a week with no overtime pay.Ms. Gundel’s protest was prompted by a TikTok video posted by a customer complaining about the disheveled state of a Dollar General store. Ms. Gundel had heard these complaints from her own customers. Why are boxes blocking the aisles? Why aren’t the shelves fully stocked?She understood their frustration. But the blame on employees is misplaced, she said.“Instead of getting mad at the people working there, trying to handle all of their workload, why don’t you say something to the actual big people in the company?” Ms. Gundel said on TikTok. “Why don’t you demand more from the company so they actually start funding the stores to be able to get all this stuff done?”Ms. Gundel soon tapped into a network of fellow employees, some of whom had already gone public about challenges at work. They included Crystal McBride, who worked at a Dollar General in Utah and had made a video that showed her store’s dumpster overflowing with trash that people had deposited there.“Thanks, guys, for adding some more dirty work for me,” Ms. McBride, 37, said in her post.

@cruiseforkarma #trash #retaillife #GameTok #utah #fyp #putinaticket ♬ original sound – Crystal She said in an interview that Dollar General had fired her earlier this month, and that her manager had warned her about some of her videos. As someone who had walked out of an abusive relationship with “just the clothes on my back” and lost her 11 year-old daughter to cancer in 2018, “I wasn’t afraid of losing my job,” she said. “I was not going to be silenced.”Neither was Ms. Gundel. As her online following grew, she kept posting more videos, many of them increasingly angry.She talked about a customer who had pulled a knife on her and a man who had reached into her car in the store parking lot and tried yanking her through the window.She said the company’s way of avoiding serious issues was to bury them in bureaucracy. “You know what they tell you? ‘Put in a ticket,’” she said.Ms. Gundel started using the hashtag #PutInATicket, which other TikTok users tagged in their own videos.On the night of March 29, Ms. Gundel posted a video, saying her boss had called her that day to discuss her videos. He told her to review the company’s social media policy, she said. She told him that she was well aware of the policy.“I was not specifically told to take my videos down, but it was recommended,” she said in the video. “To save my job and future career and where I want to go.”She closed her eyes for a moment.“I had to respectfully decline” to remove the videos, she said. “I feel like it would be against my morals and integrity to do so.”

@alwaysmrsgundel #dobetter #retail #corperateslavery #putinaticket #fyp #storemanagerlife #corperateamerica #harrassment #viral ♬ original sound – ❤️AlwaysMrs.Gundel❤️ Ms. Gundel also got a call from one of the senior executives who had sent her the “DG: 5%” pin she had been so proud of. Ms. Gundel insisted on recording the call to protect herself. The executive said she just wanted to talk through Ms. Gundel’s concerns, but didn’t want to be recorded. The call ended politely but quickly.On April 1, Ms. Gundel reported to work at 6 a.m. “Guess what,” she said in a post from outside the store. “I just got fired.”She added, “It’s pretty sad that a store manager or anybody has to go viral on a social media site in order to be listened to, in order to get some help in their store.”Ms. Gundel continues to post videos regularly and recently started driving for Uber and Lyft.While Ms. Gundel’s unionizing effort may be an uphill effort, some people say she has already had an impact. In one recent TikTok video, a woman shopping at a Dollar General in Florida credited Ms. Gundel with forcing the company to spruce up the store she shops in.“Look at the refrigerators — everything’s stacked in there,” the woman said as her camera panned the aisles. “They’ve got toilet paper to the roof, y’all.”“Thank you, Mary, for going viral and holding your ground and standing up to corporate and losing your job, because it wasn’t done in vain,” she said. “I’m proud to go into a Dollar General now, because look at it. Look at it.” More

On a recent Tuesday afternoon, Jim Farley, the chief executive of Ford Motor, took a spin in what could become one of the most important vehicles in the company’s 113-year history: an electric F-150 pickup truck.Sitting at the wheel of a prototype at the company’s test track in Dearborn, Mr. Farley floored it. From a standing stop, the 4,000-pound truck surged forward. “Four seconds,” he shouted when it reached 60 miles per hour. “That’s unbelievable for a vehicle of this size.”Steering the truck to a series of dips and rises in the track, he said, “Let’s see if we can get some air,” and shouted “Yes!” as the wheels briefly left the tarmac over one incline. In a final lap, he careened around a steeply banked turn and floored it again on a straightaway until he hit 99 miles an hour — just short of the track’s 100 m.p.h. speed limit.“I can’t wait,” Mr. Farley said as he stepped out, shaking his head. “I can’t wait till customers get this truck.”These are tense and exciting times for the auto industry. Driven by the dizzying success of Tesla, sales of electric vehicles appear to be on an unstoppable rise. The switch from making gasoline-powered cars and trucks to electric vehicles that emit no pollution from tailpipes will have far-reaching effects on the environment, climate change, public policy and the economy.Automakers are spending tens of billions of dollars to retool plants and are rushing to retrain workers for what may be the industry’s greatest transformation since Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing with the moving assembly line in 1913. They are also fighting to simply catch up to the juggernaut that is Tesla.The question for Ford is whether a car guy from the Detroit area can take on Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, whose company is rapidly expanding and is valued by investors at about 16 times as much as Ford.Tesla nearly doubled the number of cars it sold around the world last year to almost one million. Ford sold many more vehicles — nearly four million — but sales fell 6 percent as it struggled to get enough computer chips, batteries and other parts. Tesla has a brand that people associate with luxury and technical sophistication. Ford is viewed as a maker of large, utilitarian trucks and sport utility vehicles.“The traditional auto industry is pretty far behind Tesla,” said Earl J. Hesterberg, chief executive of Group 1 Automotive, a large auto retailer, who has known Mr. Farley for two decades. “In the past, if you were behind by a few years, the big players could catch up. But today, the speed of change is so much greater.”Auto experts say the electric F-150, known as the Lightning, must be a success if Ford is to thrive in the age of electric vehicles. Introducing this truck now is equivalent to “betting the company,” said William C. Ford Jr., the company’s executive chairman, who is a great-grandson of Henry Ford. “If this launch doesn’t go well, we can tarnish the entire franchise.”A Critical Year for Electric VehiclesThe popularity of battery-powered cars is soaring worldwide, even as the overall auto market stagnates.Going Mainstream: In December, Europeans for the first time bought more electric cars than diesels, once the most popular option.Turning Point: Electric vehicles account for a small slice of the market, but in 2022, their march could become unstoppable. Here is why.Tesla’s Success: A superior command of technology and its own supply chain allowed the company to bypass an industrywide crisis.Rivian’s Troubles: As the electric vehicle maker pares down its delivery targets for 2022, investors worry the company may not live up to its promise.Green Fleet: Amazon wants electric vans to make its deliveries. The problem? The auto industry barely produces any of the vehicles yet.The company has amassed about 200,000 reservations for the trucks, but it could still stumble. Production could be slowed by the global chip shortage or the surging costs of lithium, nickel and other raw materials crucial to batteries. The software that Ford has developed for the truck could be flawed, a problem that hampered sales of a new electric Volkswagen in 2020.Ford and Mr. Farley do have some things going for them. Unlike many other electric cars, the F-150 Lightning is relatively affordable — it starts at $40,000. Tesla’s cheapest car is the compact Model 3 sedan, which starts at more than $48,000. The Lightning has tons of storage, including a giant front trunk, which is appealing to families and businesses with large truck fleets. And it helps that Tesla will not begin making its Cybertruck until next year.And Ford is also already in the E.V. game with the Mustang Mach-E, an electric sport utility vehicle. It had sales of more than 27,000 in 2021, its first year on the market, and won favorable reviews.Production of the F-150 Lightning is scheduled to start next Monday. Competing models from General Motors, Stellantis and Toyota — Ford’s main rivals in pickups — are at least a year away. Rivian, a newer manufacturer that Ford has invested in, has begun selling an electric truck but is struggling to increase production.“If the Lightning launch goes well, we have an enormous opportunity,” Mr. Ford said.‘Jimmy Car-Car’In many ways, Mr. Farley checks most of the boxes when it comes to leading a large U.S. automaker. Like Mary T. Barra, the chief executive of G.M., whose father used to work on a Pontiac assembly line, Mr. Farley has family roots in the industry: His grandfather worked at a Ford factory. On visits to his grandfather, he would tour Ford plants and other sites important to the company’s history. As a 15-year-old, he bought a Mustang while working in California one summer and drove it home to Michigan without a license. His grandfather nicknamed him “Jimmy Car-Car.”But like Mr. Musk, a native of South Africa who was a founder of PayPal and other companies, Mr. Farley has had a varied career and been involved in creating businesses. Born in Argentina when his father was working there as a banker, Mr. Farley, 59, also lived in Brazil and Canada when he was growing up. His career started not in the auto industry but at IBM. He spent a long stretch at Toyota. He helped the Japanese automaker overcome its reputation for making boring and economical cars by working on its fledgling Lexus luxury brand, now a powerhouse.“He has what I call a restless mind,” said Jim Press, a former senior executive at Toyota and Chrysler. “His mind is never idling, always contemplating. He has a boldness that helps him push beyond what others think.”Mr. Farley has family roots in the automotive industry.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York TimesIn 2007, Alan R. Mulally, Ford’s chief executive at the time, hired him to help turn around Ford. He sharpened the company’s marketing, often making early use of Facebook and social media, and ran its European operations.Some at Ford bristled at his intensity. “Worrying about hurting people’s feelings isn’t at the top of his agenda,” Mr. Hesterberg said. “But it’s probably what’s necessary these days. The traditional auto industry is behind Tesla, and business as usual isn’t going to cut it.”In the last few years, Mr. Farley re-evaluated Ford’s strategy, visited technology companies in California and came to a realization: “They’re after our customers.”In 2018, Ford’s brain trust saw that the company was at great risk of falling behind Tesla, G.M. and Rivian in electric cars and pickup trucks. Ford decided not to build a new electric truck and its batteries from scratch as other automakers were doing, but to modify an existing F-150, buying batteries designed by a supplier. The move was risky because converting traditional vehicles to battery-powered ones can be difficult — batteries weigh more than engines and are placed under the floor rather than under the front hood.“We didn’t know how this would turn out, but we knew there would be a heavy penalty if we didn’t swing for the fences,” Mr. Farley said.Yet the Ford truck team’s first estimate for how many Lightnings it might sell was a paltry 20,000 a year. The estimate was oddly low because Tesla was achieving sales growth of about 50 percent a year and planning to build two giant factories.Cars Are About Software NowIn part because of his team’s lowball estimate for Lightning sales, Mr. Farley, who became chief executive in December 2020, said he was increasingly convinced that Ford needed to transform itself. Many auto executives acknowledge that one of Tesla’s main advantages is that it is far ahead of established automakers in developing software that operates its motors, manages it batteries, and informs and entertains drivers and passengers. Partly as a result, Tesla, born in Silicon Valley, makes cars that go farther on a full battery than cars made by almost anybody else.Tesla can also remotely update the software in all its cars, an ability that Ford and other established carmakers have only recently begun using. Most cars made by established manufacturers must be taken to dealers for even minor upgrades or fixes.It is not surprising, then, that Mr. Farley worries most about the potential for software bugs in the Lightning’s millions of lines of code.“As an automotive company, we’ve been trained to put vehicles out when they’re perfect,” he said. “But with software, you can change it with over-the-air updates. Our quality system isn’t used to this software orientation.”Mr. Farley said it was so critical for Ford to beef up its software chops that he spent months recruiting one of the top names in auto technology, Doug Field, who has held senior positions at Tesla and Apple.In an interview, Mr. Field, who early in his career worked at Ford, said he was drawn by the chance to build a technology team at a company with a century’s expertise in engineering and manufacturing. “If we can combine those, that is going to be something to be reckoned with,” he said.In March, Ford announced it was separating into two divisions — one, Ford Blue, will continue making internal combustion models, and another, Model E, headed by Mr. Farley and Mr. Field, will develop electric vehicles.So far, investors have supported Mr. Farley’s strategy. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ford stock traded as high as $25, up more than 300 percent since Mr. Farley took the helm, but it has fallen back to about $15. Still, Ford’s market value now exceeds that of G.M., which has long been the largest U.S. automaker.Yet Wall Street still thinks that Tesla, which is worth more than $1 trillion, will dominate the industry and that companies like Ford, worth $62 billion, and G.M., $58 billion, will become relative minnows.No wonder that Mr. Farley is spending most of his days on the Lightning. Over a dinner near his home in Birmingham, north of Detroit, he pulled out his phone and scrolled through a long email he gets every evening, with updates on every facet of the launch. “Software, manufacturing, batteries, chips, body assembly,” he said, reading off the subheadings.Workers on the production line of the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning.Sylvia Jarrus for The New York TimesOne night recently, Mr. Ford was in California when an email arrived late in the evening — from Mr. Farley, who was nine time zones away in Germany. “Jim had four or five things he wanted to talk to me about,” Mr. Ford said. “I get at least two updates a day from him.”Computer chips are a big concern. A shortage has been disrupting auto production around the world for more than a year, and outside the Dearborn Truck Plant a few hundred gasoline-powered F-150 trucks are parked and waiting for a minor but crucial component — the device that controls their automatic windshield wipers is delayed for the want of chips.Before his test drive, Mr. Farley took an hourlong tour of the Lightning assembly line, looking at how much work remains.At a section of the production line, he was shown new robotic, self-guided skids that carry the Lightning’s steel bed, or box, from one work station to the next. The skids eliminate the need for a costly and complex overhead conveyor system. Bill Dorley, the box team leader, told Mr. Farley that his crew was practically ready to go. “We just need parts,” he said.Just outside that section of the plant, heavy earth-moving machines were demolishing the concrete walls and floors of a building that was built in the 1930s to produce the Ford Model A. That space will allow the company to expand Lightning production. As Mr. Farley moved along the assembly line, workers waved and shouted greetings and sought selfies with the boss.Approaching a group of workers, Mr. Farley asked how they were doing and what they needed.Michael Johnson, who will bolt in the Lightning’s suspension system, highlighted one of the central concerns that many manufacturing workers have about electric vehicles: jobs. Because electric vehicles have fewer parts than conventional trucks, they can be made by fewer workers. Mr. Johnson was specifically concerned about a truck plant that Ford is building in Tennessee, a state that has been less welcoming to unions like the one that represents workers in Dearborn.“Is this plant going to be safe?” Mr. Johnson asked.Mr. Farley replied that the Tennessee plant would build a different truck. He added that Ford planned to start making the motors and axles for its electric vehicles, rather than buying them from suppliers. “So our own plants are going to be very busy,” he said.Ford’s future rests on that being the case. More