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    Facing Intensifying Crises, Biden Pledges Action to Address Economy and Pandemic

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesCalls for Impeachment25th Amendment ExplainedTrump Officials ResignHow Mob Stormed CapitolAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFacing Intensifying Crises, Biden Pledges Action to Address Economy and PandemicWith job losses, record coronavirus numbers and politics in turmoil after the storming of the Capitol, the president-elect pressed for quick passage of a stimulus package to help struggling Americans.President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. said it was up to Congress to decide whether to impeach President Trump, but he stressed that he expected lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to get to work quickly after he is sworn in on Jan. 20.Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesMichael D. Shear and Jan. 8, 2021WASHINGTON — President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Friday promised an accelerated response to a daunting and intensifying array of challenges as the economy showed new signs of weakness, the coronavirus pandemic killed more Americans than ever, and Congress weighed impeaching President Trump a second time.As Washington remained consumed with the fallout from the storming of the Capitol on Wednesday and Democrats stepped up their efforts to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his role in inciting the attack, Mr. Biden signaled that he intended to keep his focus on jobs and the pandemic, declining to weigh in on whether the House should impeach Mr. Trump.On a day the Labor Department reported that the economy lost 140,000 jobs in December, ending a seven-month streak of growth after the country’s plunge into recession in the spring, Mr. Biden said there was “a dire, dire need to act now.”He pledged to move rapidly once he becomes president to push a stimulus package through Congress to provide relief to struggling individuals, small businesses, students, local governments and schools.Mr. Biden and his aides have not yet finished the proposal or settled on its full amount. Forecasters expect further job losses this month, a casualty of the renewed surge of the coronavirus pandemic and state and local officials’ impositions of lockdowns and other restrictions on economic activity meant to slow the spread.“The price tag will be high,” Mr. Biden told reporters in Wilmington, Del.“It is necessary to spend the money now,” he said, apparently referring to his entire batch of economic plans, including both immediate aid and a larger bill that includes infrastructure spending. “The answer is yes, it will be in the trillions of dollars.”The Biden team is also preparing a wave of economic actions that will not require congressional approval. Mr. Biden’s aides said on Friday that the president-elect would direct the Education Department to extend a pause on student loan payments that was initially issued under Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden called on Congress on Friday to take “prompt action” to raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 an hour.He also pledged to ramp up efforts to slow the spread of the virus, which is now claiming 4,000 lives each day — more than those who perished during the Battle of Antietam during the Civil War, the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 or the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Biden’s team said the president-elect would immediately provide more vaccines to states when he takes office, breaking sharply from Mr. Trump’s practice of holding back some shots for second doses.“People are really, really, really in desperate shape,” Mr. Biden said.While he said the question of impeaching Mr. Trump was up to Congress, he assailed the president once again for his conduct in office even as he sought to position himself as focused on the issues of greatest immediate concern to voters: their health and economic security.“I thought for a long, long time President Trump was unfit to hold the job,” Mr. Biden said. “I’m focused on the virus, the vaccine and economic growth. What the Congress decides to do is for them to decide.”“But,” he added quickly, “they’re going to have to hit the ground running.”Along with the powers of the presidency that he will assume at noon on Jan. 20, Mr. Biden will take responsibility for guiding the country through a collision of crises more varied and intense than any that faced his recent predecessors. In addition to the pandemic and the faltering economy, they include racial tensions that demand reconciliation after simmering for decades and a deep political divide that flared into violence on Wednesday and rocked the country’s assumptions about its tradition of peaceful transfers of power.“It’s bigger than his presidency. It’s going to take a generation working on all this,” said Rahm Emanuel, who was former President Barack Obama’s chief of staff as he entered office during the economic crisis more than a decade ago.“He’ll take the first steps,” Mr. Emanuel said of Mr. Biden. “But you don’t deal with 20 years of change in a week or two. This is a generation’s worth of work.”Mr. Biden — who on Friday repeated his promise to work with Republicans to advance his agenda — now faces the real prospect that Mr. Trump could be standing trial for sedition in the Senate as he takes office.That work begins in earnest in 12 days, and aides to Mr. Biden said he expected lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to get to work quickly, even as the issue of Mr. Trump’s fate dominates the conversation in Washington.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Jan. 8, 2021, 10:32 p.m. ETMore national security officials resign from a White House in turmoil.A judge has blocked Trump’s sweeping restrictions on asylum applications.Josh Hawley faces blowback for role in spurious challenge of election results.Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s steps toward impeaching Mr. Trump a second time came after a surge of anger by members of both parties at what many called an insurrection by the president’s supporters. Mr. Biden on Friday called them “a bunch of thugs, insurrectionists, white supremacists, anti-Semites” who had “the active encouragement of a sitting president of the United States.”But Mr. Biden seemed aware of the political risk of becoming the primary spokesman for the punishment and removal of his predecessor, and the danger that a drawn-out impeachment and trial could delay or derail his hopes for quick passage of his biggest agenda items.He said he might have openly supported impeachment if the Capitol attacks had happened when Mr. Trump had six months left in his term. But he repeatedly suggested that the best way to be rid of the current president was to wait until Mr. Biden is inaugurated.“The question is, what happens with 14 days left to go, or 13 days left to go?” Mr. Biden said, adding later that “I am focused now on us taking control, as president and vice president, on the 20th, and to get our agenda moving as quickly as we can.”The president-elect said he thought the events at the Capitol on Wednesday might serve as a moment that drove people together, and he singled out Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Mitt Romney of Utah, both Republicans, as examples of political adversaries who shared his anger at what had happened.“Many of them are as outraged and disappointed and embarrassed and mortified by the president’s conduct as I am,” Mr. Biden said.But in the same breath, he underscored the divisions that remain in Washington, lashing out at Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, for leading the effort to overturn the election on Mr. Trump’s behalf and for spreading misinformation to the president’s supporters that helped whip them into a frenzy.He said he agreed with some Republicans who have said “how shameful it is the way Ted Cruz and others are dealing with this, how they’re responsible as well for what happened.”When asked whether Mr. Cruz should resign, Mr. Biden said, “I think they should be just flat beaten the next time they run. I think the American public has a real good, clear look at who they are. They are part of the big lie.”Mr. Biden said he was scheduled to unveil his legislative program for addressing the coronavirus crisis and its economic consequences on Thursday, six days before his inauguration as the 46th president.Mr. Biden’s economic team is deep into the process of developing proposals for a second stimulus bill and a larger economic package, including spending on infrastructure and tax increases on the rich. Aides and top congressional Democrats hope to speed the package through Congress once Mr. Biden takes office.“A devastating pandemic, an economic crisis, a country riven by political division and mistrust, institutions badly damaged and global alliances shredded,” said David Axelrod, who served as a political adviser to Mr. Obama during his first two years in the White House. “He has his hands full.”Mr. Biden and his aides have been particularly struck by two grim numbers in the jobs report on Friday: the loss of nearly 500,000 jobs in December in the leisure and hospitality industry, and of thousands of jobs in public education — a warning sign that state budget cuts could further hold back the recovery in months to come.They are particularly focused on direct checks to individuals, a policy that Mr. Biden and Democratic Senate candidates hammered in Georgia’s runoff elections that gave their party control of the chamber, and on efforts to fight the pandemic by accelerating testing for the virus and the deployment of vaccines.The contours of those proposals are beginning to take shape. The stimulus package will include Mr. Biden’s call for an additional $1,400 in direct payments to adults and children who qualified for $600 payments approved in the lame-duck stimulus passed last month, bringing the total benefit to $2,000 per individual.The challenge in steering his stimulus plans through a narrowly divided Senate was on display on Friday, when a moderate Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, said that $2,000 direct payments should not be the first priority for legislation and that he would prefer checks to be targeted “to those who need it.”The package will also include additional benefits for the nearly 11 million Americans who are still classified as unemployed by the Labor Department, assistance for renters and help for small business owners, with a focus on businesses owned by women and minorities. It will feature what Mr. Biden promised would be tens of billions of dollars to help schools reopen safely, tens of billions to help state and local governments keep essential workers on the job and “billions of dollars to get vaccines from a vial into someone’s arm.”Leaders in the Senate — like Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, who will lead the Budget Committee, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, who will be the chairman of the Finance Committee — said in interviews this week that they were preparing to work quickly with Mr. Biden’s team to draft new economic rescue legislation.Mr. Sanders said that he had spoken to Mr. Biden on Thursday about proposals, and that Mr. Sanders’ staff was already working to flesh out details.“He is, I know, going to be doing everything that he can to address the economic and health care crises facing our country,” Mr. Sanders said of Mr. Biden. “The crisis is of enormous severity, and we’ve got to move as rapidly as we can.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    The December Numbers Were Awful, but the Economy Has a Clear Path to Health

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccination StrategiesVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyUpshotSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe December Numbers Were Awful, but the Economy Has a Clear Path to HealthAmong the reasons for optimism: the prospect of widespread vaccination, and a Congress more open to stimulus spending.Jan. 8, 2021Updated 7:08 p.m. ETA construction site in Newark this week. Construction employment is still below its pre-pandemic levels, but the sector added 51,000 jobs in December.Credit…Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesIt seemed appropriate that the jobs numbers for the final months of 2020 would be as nasty as the year as a whole was.It is fair to say that the loss of 140,000 jobs in December indicates a backsliding of the economic recovery that took place in the summer and fall. Other numbers in Friday’s report confirm that basically gloomy picture, such as the continued depressed share of adults who are in the labor force. In the debate over which letter of the alphabet best describes the pattern of the 2020 economy, the December numbers pretty much rule out “V.”But. But.The details of this report, combined with everything else swirling around in economic policy and the financial markets, make for a more optimistic case. There is an opportunity for 2021 to be the year of a remarkable bounce-back, thanks to monetary and fiscal stimulus; the delayed effects of buoyant markets over the last few months; and above all the prospect of widespread coronavirus vaccination.The December numbers point to a jobs crisis that is contained to sectors dealing with the direct effects of pandemic-related shutdowns. Unlike the data from the spring of 2020, the latest numbers are not consistent with the sort of broad-based absence of demand in the economy that caused the recovery from the last few recessions to be so long and so slow.The steepest December job losses were in leisure and hospitality, a sector that shed 498,000 positions. Consider what that number represents: countless restaurants, hotels, and performance stages and arenas shuttered; and hundreds of thousands of people back on the jobless rolls and unsure when they’ll be able to resume work.The good news is we know how and when those jobs can come back. If enough Americans are vaccinated, they will probably feel comfortable in returning to normal patterns of leisure activity. An outright boom in those sectors is plausible later this year. Americans’ savings are through the roof, and it is easy to imagine pent-up demand for travel, concerts and the like. More

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    December Jobs Report: Recovery Goes Into Reverse

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Presidential TransitionliveLatest UpdatesCalls for Impeachment25th Amendment ExplainedTrump Officials ResignHow Mob Stormed CapitolAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJobs Recovery Goes Into Reverse as Pandemic Takes a New TollU.S. employment fell by 140,000 in December as virus cases surged. Leisure and hospitality businesses were hit hard, but some industries showed growth. More

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    Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Artificial IntelligenceThe Bot That WritesAre These People Real?Algorithms Against SuicideRobots Without BiasAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of ActivismThe creation of the union, a rarity in Silicon Valley, follows years of increasing outspokenness by Google workers. Executives have struggled to handle the change.Chewy Shaw, an engineer at Google, at a video meeting with other members of the union’s leadership council. He said a union would keep pressure on management.Credit…Damien Maloney for The New York TimesJan. 4, 2021, 6:00 a.m. ETOAKLAND, Calif. — More than 225 Google engineers and other workers have formed a union, the group revealed on Monday, capping years of growing activism at one of the world’s largest companies and presenting a rare beachhead for labor organizers in staunchly anti-union Silicon Valley.The union’s creation is highly unusual for the tech industry, which has long resisted efforts to organize its largely white-collar work force. It follows increasing demands by employees at Google for policy overhauls on pay, harassment and ethics, and is likely to escalate tensions with top leadership.The new union, called the Alphabet Workers Union after Google’s parent company, Alphabet, was organized in secret for the better part of a year and elected its leadership last month. The group is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, a union that represents workers in telecommunications and media in the United States and Canada.But unlike a traditional union, which demands that an employer come to the bargaining table to agree on a contract, the Alphabet Workers Union is a so-called minority union that represents a fraction of the company’s more than 260,000 full-time employees and contractors. Workers said it was primarily an effort to give structure and longevity to activism at Google, rather than to negotiate for a contract.Chewy Shaw, an engineer at Google in the San Francisco Bay Area and the vice chair of the union’s leadership council, said the union was a necessary tool to sustain pressure on management so that workers could force changes on workplace issues.“Our goals go beyond the workplace questions of, ‘Are people getting paid enough?’ Our issues are going much broader,” he said. “It is a time where a union is an answer to these problems.”In response, Kara Silverstein, Google’s director of people operations, said: “We’ve always worked hard to create a supportive and rewarding workplace for our work force. Of course, our employees have protected labor rights that we support. But as we’ve always done, we’ll continue engaging directly with all our employees.”The new union is the clearest sign of how thoroughly employee activism has swept through Silicon Valley over the past few years. While software engineers and other tech workers largely kept quiet in the past on societal and political issues, employees at Amazon, Salesforce, Pinterest and others have become more vocal on matters like diversity, pay discrimination and sexual harassment.“Our goals go beyond the workplace questions of, ‘Are people getting paid enough?’” Mr. Shaw said.Credit…Damien Maloney for The New York TimesTimnit Gebru, an artificial intelligence researcher, said Google fired her after she criticized biases in A.I. systems.Credit…Cody O’Loughlin for The New York TimesNowhere have those voices been louder than at Google. In 2018, more than 20,000 employees staged a walkout to protest how the company handled sexual harassment. Others have opposed business decisions that they deemed unethical, such as developing artificial intelligence for the Defense Department and providing technology to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.Even so, unions have not previously gained traction in Silicon Valley. Many tech workers shunned them, arguing that labor groups were focused on issues like wages — not a top concern in the high-earning industry — and were not equipped to address their concerns about ethics and the role of technology in society. Labor organizers also found it difficult to corral the tech companies’ huge workforces, which are scattered around the globe.Only a few small union drives have succeeded in tech in the past. Workers at the crowdfunding site Kickstarter and at the app development platform Glitch won union campaigns last year, and a small group of contractors at a Google office in Pittsburgh unionized in 2019. Thousands of employees at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama are also set to vote on a union in the coming months.“There are those who would want you to believe that organizing in the tech industry is completely impossible,” Sara Steffens, C.W.A.’s secretary-treasurer, said of the new Google union. “If you don’t have unions in the tech industry, what does that mean for our country? That’s one reason, from C.W.A.’s point of view, that we see this as a priority.”Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, said the Google union was a “powerful experiment” because it brought unionization into a major tech company and skirted barriers that have prevented such organizing.“If it grows — which Google will do everything they can to prevent — it could have huge impacts not just for the workers, but for the broader issues that we are all thinking about in terms of tech power in society,” she said.The union is likely to ratchet up tensions between Google engineers, who work on autonomous cars, artificial intelligence and internet search, and the company’s management. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, and other executives have tried to come to grips with an increasingly activist work force — but have made missteps.Last month, federal officials said Google had wrongly fired two employees who protested its work with immigration authorities in 2019. Timnit Gebru, a Black woman who is a respected artificial intelligence researcher, also said last month that Google fired her after she criticized the company’s approach to minority hiring and the biases built into A.I. systems. Her departure set off a storm of criticism about Google’s treatment of minority employees.“These companies find it a bone in their throat to even have a small group of people who say, ‘We work at Google and have another point of view,’” said Nelson Lichtenstein, the director of the Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “Google might well succeed in decimating any organization that comes to the floor.”The Alphabet Workers Union, which represents employees in Silicon Valley and cities like Cambridge, Mass., and Seattle, gives protection and resources to workers who join. Those who opt to become members will contribute 1 percent of their total compensation to the union to fund its efforts.Over the past year, the C.W.A. has pushed to unionize white-collar tech workers. (The NewsGuild, a union that represents New York Times employees, is part of C.W.A.) The drive focused initially on employees at video game companies, who often work grueling hours and face layoffs.In late 2019, C.W.A. organizers began meeting with Google employees to discuss a union drive, workers who attended the meetings said. Some employees were receptive and signed cards to officially join the union last summer. In December, the Alphabet Workers Union held elections to select a seven-person executive council.But several Google employees who had previously organized petitions and protests at the company objected to the C.W.A.’s overtures. They said they declined to join because they worried that the effort had sidelined experienced organizers and played down the risks of organizing as it recruited members.Google employees staged a walkout in 2018 to protest how the company handled sexual harassment.Credit…Bebeto Matthews/Associated PressAmr Gaber, a Google software engineer who helped organize the 2018 walkout, said that C.W.A. officials were dismissive of other labor groups that had supported Google workers during a December 2019 phone call with him and others.“They are more concerned about claiming turf than the needs of the workers who were on the phone call,” Mr. Gaber said. “As a long-term labor organizer and brown man, that’s not the type of union I want to build.”The C.W.A. said it was selected by Google workers to help organize the union and had not elbowed their way in. “It’s really the workers who chose,” Ms. Steffens of C.W.A. said.Traditional unions typically enroll a majority of a work force and petition a state or federal labor board like the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election. If they win the vote, they can bargain with their employer on a contract. A minority union allows employees to organize without first winning a formal vote before the N.L.R.B.The C.W.A. has used this model to organize groups in states where it said labor laws are unfavorable, like the Texas State Employees Union and the United Campus Workers in Tennessee.The structure also gives the union the latitude to include Google contractors, who outnumber full-time workers and who would be excluded from a traditional union. Some Google employees have considered establishing a minority or solidarity union for several years, and ride-hailing drivers have formed similar groups.Although they will not be able to negotiate a contract, the Alphabet Workers Union can use other tactics to pressure Google into changing its policies, labor experts said. Minority unions often turn to public pressure campaigns and lobby legislative or regulatory bodies to influence employers.“We’re going to use every tool that we can to use our collective action to protect people who we think are being discriminated against or retaliated against,” Mr. Shaw said.Members cited the recent N.L.R.B. finding on the firing of two employees and the exit of Ms. Gebru, the prominent researcher, as reasons to broaden its membership and publicly step up its efforts.“Google is making it all the more clear why we need this now,” said Auni Ahsan, a software engineer at Google and an at-large member of the union’s executive council. “Sometimes the boss is the best organizer.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Why Markets Boomed in a Year of Human Misery

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus PlanVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storyUpshotSupported byContinue reading the main storyWhy Markets Boomed in a Year of Human MiseryIt wasn’t just the Fed or the stimulus. The rise in savings among white-collar workers created a tide lifting nearly all financial assets.Neil Irwin and Jan. 1, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETThe central, befuddling economic reality of the United States at the close of 2020 is that everything is terrible in the world, while everything is wonderful in the financial markets.It’s a macabre spectacle. Asset prices keep reaching new, extraordinary highs, when around 3,000 people a day are dying of coronavirus and 800,000 people a week are filing new unemployment claims. Even an enthusiast of modern capitalism might wonder if something is deeply broken in how the economy works.To better understand this strange mix of buoyant markets and economic despair, it’s worth turning to the data. As it happens, the numbers offer a coherent narrative about how the United States arrived at this point — one with lessons about how policy, markets and the economy intersect — and reveal the sharp disparity between the pandemic year’s haves and have-nots.Income More

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    27 Places Raising the Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyOnce a Fringe Idea, the $15 Minimum Wage Is Making Big GainsThe new year brings another round of increases, nearly a decade after workers started campaigning for higher pay.Demonstrators calling for a $15 minimum hourly wage outside a Marriott hotel in Des Moines in 2016. Credit…Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesDec. 31, 2020, 5:34 p.m. ETIt started in 2012 with a group of protesters outside a McDonald’s demanding a $15 minimum wage — an idea that even many liberal lawmakers considered outlandish. In the years since, their fight has gained traction across the country, including in conservative states with low union membership and generally weak labor laws.On Friday, 20 states and 32 cities and counties will raise their minimum wage. In 27 of these places, the pay floor will reach or exceed $15 an hour, according to a report released on Thursday by the National Employment Law Project, which supports minimum-wage increases. The movement’s strength — a ballot measure to increase the minimum wage in Florida to $15 by 2026 was passed in November — could put renewed pressure on Congress to increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour, where it has been since 2009. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has endorsed $15 an hour at the federal level and other changes sought by labor groups, like ending the practice of a lower minimum wage for workers like restaurant workers who receive tips.But even without congressional action, labor activists said they would keep pushing their campaign at the state and local levels. By 2026, 42 percent of Americans will work in a location with a minimum wage of at least $15 an hour, according to an Economic Policy Institute estimate cited in the NELP report.“These wages going up in a record number of states is the result of years of advocacy by workers and years of marching on the streets and organizing their fellow workers and their communities,” said Yannet Lathrop, a researcher and policy analyst for the group.The wage rates are increasing as workers struggle amid a recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic that has left millions unemployed.“The Covid crisis has really exacerbated inequalities across society,” said Greg Daco, chief U.S. economist for Oxford Economics. “This has given more strength to these movements that try to ensure that everyone benefits from a strong labor market in the form a sustainable salary.”Workers during the pandemic have been subject to furloughs, pay cuts and decreased hours. Low-wage service workers have not had the option of working from home, and the customer-facing nature of their jobs puts them at greater risk for contracting the virus. Many retailers gave workers raises — or “hero pay” — at the beginning of the pandemic, only to quietly end the practice in the summer, even as the virus continued to surge in many states.“The coronavirus pandemic has pushed a lot of working families into deep poverty,” said Anthony Advincula, director of communications for Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit focused on improving wages and working conditions. “So this minimum wage increase will be a huge welcome boost for low-wage workers, especially in the restaurant industry.”Mary Kay Henry, international president of the Service Employees International Union, said the labor movement would make getting even more workers to $15 an hour or more a priority in 2021.“There’s millions more workers who need to have more money in their pockets,” she said, adding that the election of Mr. Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would bolster the effort. “We have an incredible opportunity.”Because many hourly service workers are Black, Hispanic, Native American and Asian, people of color stand to gain the most from minimum-wage increases. A 2018 study from the Economic Policy Institute found that workers of color are far more likely to be paid poverty-level wages than white workers.“It’s the single most dramatic action to create racial equality,” Ms. Henry said.Some economists say lifting the minimum wage will benefit the economy and could be an important part of the recovery from the pandemic recession. That is partly because lower-income workers typically spend most of the money they earn, and that spending primarily takes place where they live and work.Kate Bahn, director of labor market policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, said that after the 2007-9 recession, growth was anemic for years as pay stagnated and the job market slowly clawed its way back.A shopkeeper in Los Angeles waited for customers. Business groups say increasing the minimum wage can hurt small businesses, already beleaguered by the coronavirus pandemic.Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times“There’s been a broader acknowledgment that the lackluster wage growth we’ve seen in the past 30 years and since the Great Recession reflects structural imbalances in the economy, and structural inequality,” Ms. Bahn said.Many business groups counter that increasing the minimum wage will hurt small businesses, already beleaguered by the pandemic. More than 110,000 restaurants have closed permanently or for the long term during the pandemic, according to the National Restaurant Association.Increasing the minimum wage could lead employers to lay off some workers in order to pay others more, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine.“There’s a ton of research that says increasing minimum wages can cause some job loss,” he said. “Plenty workers are helped, but some are hurt.”A 2019 Congressional Budget Office study found that a $15 federal minimum wage would increase pay for 17 million workers who earned less than that and potentially another 10 million workers who earned slightly more. According to the study’s median estimate, it would cause 1.3 million other workers to lose their jobs.In New York, State Senate Republicans had urged Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, to halt increases that went into effect on Thursday, arguing that they could amount to “the final straw” for some small businesses.While increases to the minimum wage beyond a certain point could lead to job losses, Ms. Bahn of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth argued that “we are nowhere near that point.”Economic research has found that recent minimum-wage increases have not had caused huge job losses. In a 2019 study, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that wages had increased sharply for leisure and hospitality workers in New York counties bordering Pennsylvania, which had a lower minimum, while employment growth continued. In many cases, higher minimum wages are rolled out over several years to give businesses time to adapt.Regardless of whether there is federal action, more state ballot initiatives will seek to raise the minimum wage, said Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.“At a basic level, people think that this is an issue of fairness,” Mr. Dube said. “There’s broad-based support for the idea that people who are working should get a living wage.”Jeanna Smialek More

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    Unemployment Claims Expected to Have Remained High Last Week

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus PlanVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyUnemployment Claims Expected to Have Remained High Last WeekThe weekly report, which will be published Thursday morning, might show a drop in claims because of the Christmas holiday.Victor Lopez-Lucas plays with his daughter Kenya, 1, as they wait in line to receive food donations in Bradenton, Fla., on Tuesday.Credit…Eve Edelheit for The New York TimesDec. 31, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETNew clues to the economy’s trajectory heading into 2021 will come Thursday morning when the government reports the latest data on initial claims for jobless benefits.While the Christmas holiday might cause a dip in the numbers, with state unemployment offices that process claims closed for at least one day last week, new filings are expected to stay at a very high level, in the range of more than 800,000 per week, said Greg Daco, chief economist at Oxford Economics. “That’s very elevated and we are facing an economy that has slowed down significantly.”Applications for benefits declined during Thanksgiving week, only to move higher later, and a similar catch-up phenomenon could happen after Christmas and New Years, too.In California, widening restrictions on restaurants and other businesses and an uptick in coronavirus infections may cause filings to jump, said Scott Anderson, chief economist at Bank of the West in San Francisco.“California has locked down even more, and there is no end in sight in terms of cases and hospitalizations,” he said. “We’re seeing more layoffs and that hasn’t shown up in the numbers yet.”The $900 billion stimulus package that President Trump signed into law Sunday comes too late to affect the jobless claims data. It will take months for the impact of the aid to be felt, and most economists expect the rate of layoffs to remain high.When fresh monthly jobs data is released by the Labor Department next week, Mr. Anderson expects that it will show a rise in the unemployment rate to 6.9 percent in December, up from 6.7 percent last month. The unemployment rate has fallen sharply since peaking at 14.7 percent in April but hiring has slowed as the economy has faltered in recent months.What’s more, the pace of layoffs has been persistently high, as sectors like dining, travel and entertainment are struggling while the pandemic has kept many people at home.The introduction of vaccines is a bright spot, as are positive economic signs, like surging stock prices and a booming housing market. But it will be months before enough Americans can be inoculated to allow people to go to restaurants, events and movie theaters without fear of being infected.“The trend is not good with the additional closures implemented around the country,” said Carl Tannenbaum, chief economist at Northern Trust in Chicago.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More