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    Workers Expect Fast Inflation Next Year. Could That Make It a Reality?

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    The Federal Reserve chair is eyeing near-term inflation expectations, which might shape wages — and help keep prices rising rapidly.Amitis Oskoui, a consultant who works mostly with nonprofits and philanthropies, has not had a wage increase since inflation began to noticeably eat away at her paycheck early this year. What she has had are job offers.Ms. Oskoui, 36, has tried to leverage those prospects to argue for a raise as the rising cost of food, child care and life in general in Orange County, Calif., has cut into her family budget.“Generally, in the past, it was taboo to say: I need it to survive, and I know what I’m worth on the market,” she said. “In this environment, I think it’s more acceptable. Inflation is so front of mind, and it’s a big part of the public conversation about the economy.”That logic, reasonable at an individual level, is making the Federal Reserve nervous as it echoes across America.When employees successfully push for raises to cover their cost of living, companies face higher wage bills. To offset those expenses, firms may lift prices, creating a cycle in which fast inflation today begets fast — and maybe even faster — inflation tomorrow.So far, Fed officials do not think that wage growth has been a primary driver of America’s rapid inflation, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said on Wednesday.But an employment report set for release Friday is likely to show that average hourly earnings climbed 4.7 percent over the past year, economists predict. That is far faster than the 3 percent pace that prevailed before the pandemic, and is so quick that it could make it difficult for inflation to fully fade. Plus, policymakers remain anxious that today’s pressures could yet turn into a spiral in which wages and prices chase each other higher.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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    Elon Musk Begins Layoffs at Twitter

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    The social media company’s 7,500 employees have been bracing for job cuts since Mr. Musk took it over last week.SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk will begin laying off Twitter employees on Friday, culling the social media company’s 7,500-person work force a little over a week after completing his blockbuster buyout.Twitter employees were notified in a company-wide email that the layoffs were set to begin, according to a copy of the message seen by The New York Times. About half the company’s workers appeared set to lose their jobs, according to internal messages and an investor, though the final count may take time to become clear. The email instructed Twitter employees to go home and not return to the offices on Friday as the cuts proceeded. Mr. Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter on Oct. 27 and immediately fired its chief executive and other top managers. More executives have since resigned or were let go, while managers were asked to draw up lists of high- and low-performing employees, likely with an eye toward job cuts.Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, faces pressure to make Twitter work financially. The deal was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. The billionaire also loaded about $13 billion in debt on Twitter for the acquisition and is on the hook to pay about $1 billion a year in interest payments. But Twitter has often lost money, and its cash flow is not robust. Mr. Musk may benefit from cutting costs so the company is less expensive to operate.Twitter’s layoffs are unlikely to be the largest in the tech industry by total number. The computer manufacturer HP cut 24,600 of its employees, about 7.5 percent, in 2008. It later cut tens of thousands more, reaching about 30 percent of its work force.Elon Musk’s Acquisition of TwitterCard 1 of 8A blockbuster deal. More

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    Job Openings Rose in September Despite Higher Interest Rates

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    The labor market has remained stronger than expected even as the Federal Reserve has tried to get inflation under control.The nation’s extreme shortage of job seekers worsened in September, the Labor Department reported Tuesday, after easing the previous month.Employers had 10.7 million positions open as summer ended, up from 10.3 million in August. That left roughly 1.9 posted jobs for every unemployed worker, a persistently high ratio even as the economy appears to be decelerating because the Federal Reserve is working to quell inflation.Pulling down job postings — or holding off on new ones — is usually the first step that employers take as the economy weakens, in hopes that hiring more conservatively could avoid the need to lay people off later. But the labor market has been slow to respond to rising interest rates, even as other indicators point toward an impending recession.The report is the last piece of significant economic data to land before policymakers at the Fed meet on Wednesday, and only reinforces the likely outcome. Most analysts expect the central bank to raise its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percentage points, even if job openings tumbled in Tuesday’s Labor Department report.“What if all the JOLTS dropped to zero?” said Dana Peterson, chief economist at the Conference Board, using shorthand for the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. “I don’t think that would cause them to not go 75 basis points, because they’re focused on inflation. They’ve already said there’s going to be some pain, and pain is code for the labor market.”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.September Jobs Report: Job growth eased slightly in September but remained robust, indicating that the economy was maintaining momentum despite higher interest rates.A Cooling Market?: Unemployment is low and hiring is strong, but there are signs that the red-hot labor market may be coming off its boiling point.Disabled Workers: With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.A Feast or Famine Career: America’s port truck drivers are a nearly-invisible yet crucial part of the global supply chain. And they are sinking into desperation.The number of open jobs is consistent with surveys of businesses, which have continued to report difficulty hiring. The National Federation of Independent Business found in its September survey that 23 percent of its members planned to create new jobs in the next three months, and of those, 89 percent said they had few qualified applicants.The jump in job openings was largely due to huge increases at hotels and restaurants, which added 215,000 postings. And the health care and social assistance sector was looking for 115,000 more workers than the previous month, reaching 2.1 million openings total, the highest level on record.At the same time, the number of people hired declined to about 6.1 million, continuing a downward slide that began this spring. That could be a consequence of employers having a tougher time finding qualified applicants, or deciding to hold positions open longer as they wait for the economic dust to settle.The number of people quitting their jobs voluntarily, usually a sign that workers have confidence they’ll be able to find a better one, declined slightly to about 4.1 million. As a share of total employment, that was about level with recent months but down from record highs at the end of 2021.Inflation has forced some workers to find ways to increase their earnings — whether by asking for raises or finding other jobs. At the same time, fear of a looming recession has prompted some workers to stay put unless they have another offer in hand.Quitting fell most in industries that are facing the strongest headwinds from higher interest rates and weakening consumer spending, including construction, transportation and warehousing, and manufacturing.The number of layoffs also declined from recent months. That’s in line with the weekly reports of initial claims for unemployment insurance, which have remained near record lows. After hiring aggressively over the past year — and often at higher salaries — employers may be less eager to let people go, even as business wavers.In an August survey of hiring managers by the polling firm Morning Consult, about 57 percent of respondents said they were retaining more employees than they normally would because of how difficult it was to replace people. That may lead to a reversal of the typical “last-in, first-out” pattern that has been common in other downturns.“If you spent a lot of money attracting workers, you don’t want to let them go right away, because then all that money just goes down the drain,” Ms. Peterson said. “Six months later you have to find them again, and they might be asking for a different asking price. You want to keep all your talent, but if you think about it, it’s very expensive to let go of those workers you just hired and invested a lot in.” More

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    Workers at Trader Joe’s in Brooklyn Reject Union

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    Workers at a Trader Joe’s store in Brooklyn have voted against unionizing, handing a union its first loss at the company after two victories this year.The workers voted 94 to 66 against joining Trader Joe’s United, an independent union that represents employees at stores in Western Massachusetts and Minneapolis. Workers at a Trader Joe’s in Colorado filed for an election this summer but withdrew their petition shortly before a scheduled vote.“We are grateful that our crew members trust us to continue to do the work of listening and responding to their needs, as we always have,” Nakia Rohde, a company spokeswoman, said in a statement after the National Labor Relations Board announced the result on Thursday.The result raises questions about whether the uptick in union activity over the past year, in which unions won elections at several previously nonunion companies like Starbucks, Amazon and Apple, may be slowing.Union supporters recently lost an election at an Amazon warehouse near Albany, N.Y., and the pace of unionization at Starbucks has dropped in recent months, though the union has won elections at over 250 of the company’s 9,000 corporate-owned U.S. stores so far.Workers at a second Apple store recently won an election in Oklahoma City, however, and unions have upcoming votes at a Home Depot in Philadelphia and a studio owned by the video game maker Activision Blizzard in upstate New York.As of June, Trader Joe’s had more than 500 locations and 50,000 employees across the country and was not unionized. Early in the pandemic, the company’s chief executive sent a letter to employees complaining of a “current barrage of union activity that has been directed at Trader Joe’s” and arguing that union supporters “clearly believe that now is a moment when they can create some sort of wedge in our company.”The company has said it is prepared to negotiate contracts at its unionized stores. An employee involved in the union, Maeg Yosef, said the two sides were settling on bargaining dates.Union supporters at the Brooklyn store had said they were seeking an increase in wages, improved health care benefits and paid sick leave as well as changes that would make the company’s disciplinary process more fair.Before union supporters had a chance to talk with all their colleagues, management became aware of the campaign and announced it in a note posted in the store’s break room in late September. The company also fired a prominent union supporter a day or two later.Amy Wilson, a leader of the union campaign in the store, said organizing had become more difficult after the firing and the note from management.“The last core of people hadn’t been spoken to directly by their co-workers, and we lost them instantly,” she said, referring to the note. “It undermined the trust, the relationship. They felt excluded and offended.”Ms. Rohde, the Trader Joe’s spokeswoman, did not respond to a question about why management posted the break room note. She said that while she couldn’t comment on the firing of the union supporter, “we have never and would never fire a crew member for organizing.”Trader Joe’s is known for providing relatively good wages and benefits for the industry, though workers have complained that the company has made its health care and retirement benefits less generous over the past decade. More

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    Most NYC Job Postings Must Include Salaries Starting in November

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    A new city law going into effect on Tuesday will require companies with at least four employees to post salary ranges for openings, even if the jobs involve remote or hybrid work.For years, companies of all sizes have closely guarded the potential pay for their job openings, keeping applicants in the dark about possible compensation and preventing employees from discovering that their colleagues make more than they do.But that dynamic, which has long benefited corporations in salary negotiations and has been blamed for exacerbating gender and racial pay gaps, will soon end in New York City, one of the largest job markets in the world.Under a new city law that goes into effect on Tuesday, nearly every company will be required to include salary ranges for job postings, both those shared on public sites and on internal bulletin boards, and even for those jobs that offer a hybrid schedule or can be performed fully remote.Here’s what the law will mean for employers and workers in New York City.What information will companies have to divulge?The sweeping New York City rules will apply to almost all companies except for the smallest firms. Any business with at least four workers, assuming at least one of them is based in the city, must include the lowest and highest salaries for any job it posts — a requirement that will force some of the biggest companies in the world with offices in New York City, from Google to Pfizer to Verizon, to divulge pay information.The salary ranges must be provided in “good faith,” the city says, which means that they must accurately reflect what the company would be ready to give a new employee. The ranges are for base salary, excluding the cost of other benefits like overtime, paid vacation and health insurance.Is this new salary transparency a requirement in other parts of the country?The new requirements put New York City among a growing number of places in the United States that require salary transparency from private employers. The trend has taken hold during the pandemic as leverage in the American workplace has increasingly shifted toward workers.Colorado implemented salary requirements for job openings earlier this year, and California and Washington State will mandate similar rules in 2023. The New York State Senate passed a salary transparency law in June that is similar to the one in New York City, but it has yet to be signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul.Some of the biggest employers in New York City are complying with the new pay disclosure requirements for all of their jobs openings nationwide, not just their postings in the city.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesIn the city, the salary requirements were passed nearly a year ago by the City Council during the last days of the administration of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. Company executives and business groups were caught off guard, complaining that they were not consulted on the legislation and were unaware of it until just before it was approved.That criticism led the city to delay the start date to November from May and to make some tweaks, including removing the fine for a first-time offense; subsequent offenses, however, can cost up to $250,000. The new law will be enforced by the city’s Commission on Human Rights.Will companies comply?Several large companies in the financial and tech industries have already updated their job postings to be in compliance. Some corporations have gone further, such as Citigroup, which added salary information this month to all of its openings in the United States, not just those in New York City, where the bank is one of the city’s largest private employers.The changes have been reflected in active job openings. At Citigroup, a senior associate at the bank’s New York City offices can earn more than $125,000 annually. A director at American Express will make at least $130,000. And a software engineer at Amazon can earn a salary as high as $213,800.Earlier this year, the real estate company Zillow, as well as its New York City listings site StreetEasy, started to include salary information on openings in the city, the company said. One recent listing, for a strategic communications manager at StreetEasy, offered a salary of at least $99,300.A spokeswoman at Citigroup said that the bank added salary ranges not just for jobs in New York City but throughout the country as part of a company initiative focused on pay fairness and employee retention.“This initiative supports our pay equity goals and reinforces many key principles such as being more transparent as an organization and simplifying our processes,” the spokeswoman said.Glenn Grindlinger, an employment lawyer at the firm Fox Rothschild, said that many large corporations may follow the path of Citigroup and add salary ranges on all jobs in the country. Doing so would ensure compliance with New York City law, which also covers remote jobs that could be performed in the city, he said.But Mr. Grindlinger said he was concerned about small- and medium-size companies in the city, especially those outside Manhattan, that may be unaware of the new law, as well as firms in other parts of the country that do not know that their remote jobs, if they can be performed in New York City, will also have to comply.“It’s a pretty big deal,” Mr. Grindlinger said. “And the outreach, it has not been where it is needed, which is in the other boroughs.”How could this change affect job seekers?Stephanie Lewin, 39, works as a sales associate at a clothing and home goods store in Lower Manhattan and has been looking for a new job. She has noticed an increase in compensation disclosures on Indeed’s online job listings, but some of the salary bands are too far apart to be helpful, she said, like listings that propose a range of $17 to $50 an hour.But overall, she said the disclosures have been helpful in weeding out jobs for which the upper salary range falls below her expectation of earning at least $25 an hour. “It definitely at least takes away one element of surprise or decision-making upfront,” said Ms. Lewin, who has worked in the retail industry for 16 years.Mr. Grindlinger said he believed the new salary ranges would lead applicants to negotiate for a salary at the higher end of the scale. “The economy and inflation has swung the pendulum toward the employee,” he said.A spokeswoman at Indeed said that an increasing number of openings on its site across the country now included possible salaries provided by employers. (The company did not have data for New York City-based jobs.) About 37 percent of jobs posted in the third quarter of 2022 included pay information from the employer, the spokeswoman said.New York’s new pay transparency law will force some of the biggest companies in the world with offices in the city, from Google to Pfizer to Verizon, to divulge salary information. John Smith/VIEWpress, via Getty ImagesJoe Stando said if the salary transparency law had been in effect earlier in the pandemic, it would have saved him time and disappointment during his job search. Mr. Stando said he had at least three job opportunities over the past year that fell apart over salary negotiations. Each time, the companies’ offers were below what he had requested.“I would much rather have it coming out early on so that I can know before applying or early on in the conversation that we are maybe not aligned,” said Mr. Stando, 33, who lives in Queens and has worked in office administrative roles. “You can’t really negotiate unless they have all their cards on the table.”Instead of disclosing salaries for New York City jobs, some companies might exclude workers in the city from applying for positions. When Colorado’s salary transparency law went into effect in January, some major employers, including the real estate firm CBRE and the drug distributor McKeeson, stated that Colorado residents would not be considered for remote jobs. (McKeeson now posts salary ranges for remote openings in Colorado.)Mr. Grindlinger said he had talked to company executives outside New York City who might avoid having to comply with the city’s law by barring new employees from working there.“Clients that are not based in New York, they just don’t know what they are going to do, or some say if that’s the requirements, we are not going to consider anyone working in New York City,” he said.How could this help address long-lingering inequities in compensation such as the gender pay gap?Tae-Youn Park, an associate professor of human resource studies at Cornell University, said that research into salary disclosure laws that have been implemented elsewhere, including in Denmark, has shown that they help narrow the pay gap between men and women.In the United States, women made about 82 cents for every $1 men earned in 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that pay inequity is constant across almost all occupations. The gap is larger for women of color.Mr. Park said that the salary disclosures in New York City would likely force managers to compare their salaries to those offered at other companies and make adjustments. Also, employees might feel empowered to confront their bosses if the ranges showed they were underpaid.“It will give them an opportunity to raise their voice with objective data,” Mr. Park said.Nicole Hong More

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    How Is Your Company Responding to Labor Organizing? We Want to Hear.

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    Employers are taking a variety of approaches to union campaigns.An Amazon Labor Union rally on Staten Island in April.DeSean McClinton-Holland for The New York TimesMaterials being prepared for workers seeking to unionize Starbucks stores.Tony Luong for The New York TimesThere has been a surge in labor organizing among baristas at Starbucks, warehouse workers at Amazon and retail workers at Apple and Trader Joe’s. They have made their voices heard, though only a fraction of each group has joined a union, and some have rejected unionization.We’d like to hear the voices of those farther from the front lines — managers and white-collar workers at those companies, particularly those at corporate headquarters. If you fit this profile, please consider responding to the questions below. Your answers may help us better understand the state of labor relations and inform our reporting.We won’t publish your name or any part of your submission without contacting you first. If you prefer to share tips or thoughts confidentially, you can do so here.Tell us how your employer is dealing with union efforts. More

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    For Disabled Workers, a Tight Labor Market Opens New Doors

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    With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.The strong late-pandemic labor market is giving a lift to a group often left on the margins of the economy: workers with disabilities.Employers, desperate for workers, are reconsidering job requirements, overhauling hiring processes and working with nonprofit groups to recruit candidates they might once have overlooked. At the same time, companies’ newfound openness to remote work has led to opportunities for people whose disabilities make in-person work — and the taxing daily commute it requires — difficult or impossible.As a result, the share of disabled adults who are working has soared in the past two years, far surpassing its prepandemic level and outpacing gains among people without disabilities.

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    Share employed, change since Jan. 2020
    Note: Includes workers between 18 and 64 years old. Data is not seasonally adjusted.Source: Current Population Survey, via IPUMSBy The New York TimesIn interviews and surveys, people with disabilities report that they are getting not only more job offers, but better ones, with higher pay, more flexibility and more openness to providing accommodations that once would have required a fight, if they were offered at all.“The new world we live in has opened the door a little bit more,” said Gene Boes, president and chief executive of the Northwest Center, a Seattle organization that helps people with disabilities become more independent. “The doors are opening wider because there’s just more demand for labor.”Samir Patel, who lives in the Seattle area, has a college degree and certifications in accounting. But he also has autism spectrum disorder, which has made it difficult for him to find steady work. He has spent most of his career in temporary jobs found through staffing agencies. His longest job lasted a little over a year; many lasted only a few months.This summer, however, Mr. Patel, 42, got a full-time, permanent job as an accountant for a local nonprofit group. The job brought a 30 percent raise, along with retirement benefits, more predictable hours and other perks. Now he is thinking about buying a home, traveling and dating — steps that seemed impossible without the stability of a steady job.“It’s a boost in confidence,” he said. “There were times when I felt like I was behind.”Mr. Patel, whose disability affects his speech and can make conversation difficult, worked with an employment coach at the Northwest Center to help him request accommodations both during the interview process and once he started the job. And while Mr. Patel usually prefers to work in the office, his new employer also allows him to work remotely when he needs to — a big help on days when he finds the sensory overload of the office overwhelming.“If I have my bad days, I just pick up the laptop and work from home,” he said.Workers with disabilities have long seen their fortunes ebb and flow with the economy. Federal law prohibits most employers from discriminating against people with disabilities, and it requires them to make reasonable accommodations. But research has found that discrimination remains common: One 2017 study found that job applications that disclosed a disability were 26 percent less likely to receive interest from prospective employers. And even when they can find jobs, workers with disabilities frequently encounter barriers to success, from bathroom doors they cannot open without assistance to hostile co-workers.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.September Jobs Report: Job growth eased slightly in September but remained robust, indicating that the economy was maintaining momentum despite higher interest rates.A Cooling Market?: Unemployment is low and hiring is strong, but there are signs that the red-hot labor market may be coming off its boiling point.Factory Jobs: American manufacturers have now added enough jobs to regain all that they shed during the pandemic — and then some.Missing Workers: The labor market appears hot, but the supply of labor has fallen short, holding back the economy. Here is why.Workers with disabilities — like other groups that face obstacles to employment, such as those with criminal records — tend to benefit disproportionately from strong job markets, when employers have more of an incentive to seek out untapped pools of talent. But when recessions hit, those opportunities quickly dry up.“We have a last-in, first-out labor market, and disabled people are often among the last in and the first out,” said Adam Ozimek, chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington research organization.Remote work, however, has the potential to break that cycle, at least for some workers. In a new study, Mr. Ozimek found that employment had risen for workers with disabilities across industries as the labor market improved, consistent with the usual pattern. But it has improved especially rapidly in industries and occupations where remote work is more common. And many economists believe that the shift toward remote work, unlike the red-hot labor market, is likely to prove lasting.More than 35 percent of disabled Americans ages 18 to 64 had jobs in September. That was up from 31 percent just before the pandemic and is a record in the 15 years the government has kept track. Among adults without disabilities, 78 percent had jobs, but their employment rates have only just returned to the level before the pandemic.“Disabled adults have seen employment rates recover much faster,” Mr. Ozimek said. “That’s good news, and it’s important to understand whether that’s a temporary thing or a permanent thing. And my conclusion is that not only is it a permanent thing, but it’s going to improve.”Before the pandemic, Kathryn Wiltz repeatedly asked her employer to let her work from home because of her disability, a chronic autoimmune disorder whose symptoms include pain and severe fatigue. Her requests were denied.Ms. Wiltz’s new job allows her to work from home permanently.Sarah Rice for The New York TimesWhen the pandemic hit, however, the hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich., where Ms. Wiltz worked in the medical billing department sent her home along with many of her colleagues. Last month, she started a job with a new employer, an insurance company, in which she will be permanently able to work remotely.Being able to work from home was a high priority for Ms. Wiltz, 31, because the treatments she receives suppress her immune system, leaving her vulnerable to the coronavirus. And even if that risk subsides, she said, she finds in-person work taxing: Getting ready for work, commuting to the office and interacting with colleagues all drain energy reserves that are thin to begin with. As she struggled through one particularly difficult day recently, she said, she reflected on how hard it would have been to need to go into the office.“It would have been almost impossible,” she said. “I would have pushed myself and I would have pushed my body, and there’s a very real possibility that I would have ended up in the hospital.”There are also subtler benefits. Ms. Wiltz can get the monthly drug infusions she receives to treat her disorder during her lunch break, rather than taking time off work. She can turn down the lights to stave off migraines. She doesn’t have to worry that her colleagues are staring at her and wondering what is wrong. All of that, she said, makes her a more productive employee.“It makes me a lot more comfortable and able to think more clearly and do a better job anyway,” she said.The sudden embrace of remote work during the pandemic was met with some exasperation from some disability-rights leaders, who had spent years trying, mostly without success, to persuade employers to offer more flexibility to their employees.“Remote work and remote-work options are something that our community has been advocating for for decades, and it’s a little frustrating that for decades corporate America was saying it’s too complicated, we’ll lose productivity, and now suddenly it’s like, sure, let’s do it,” said Charles-Edouard Catherine, director of corporate and government relations for the National Organization on Disability.Still, he said the shift is a welcome one. For Mr. Catherine, who is blind, not needing to commute to work means not coming home with cuts on his forehead and bruises on his leg. And for people with more serious mobility limitations, remote work is the only option.Many employers are now scaling back remote work and are encouraging or requiring employees to return to the office. But experts expect remote and hybrid work to remain much more common and more widely accepted than it was before the pandemic. That may make it easier for disabled employees to continue to work remotely.The pandemic may also reshape the legal landscape. In the past, employers often resisted offering remote work as an accommodation to disabled workers, and judges rarely required them to do so. But that may change now that so many companies were able to adapt to remote work in 2020, said Arlene S. Kanter, director of the Disability Law and Policy Program at the Syracuse University law school.“If other people can show that they can perform their work well at home, as they did during Covid, then people with disabilities, as a matter of accommodation, shouldn’t be denied that right,” Ms. Kanter said.Ms. Kanter and other experts caution that not all people with disabilities want to work remotely. And many jobs cannot be done from home. A disproportionate share of workers with disabilities are employed in retail and other industries where remote work is uncommon. Despite recent gains, people with disabilities are still far less likely to have jobs, and more likely to live in poverty, than people without them.“When we say it’s historically high, that’s absolutely true, but we don’t want to send the wrong message and give ourselves a pat on the back,” Mr. Catherine said. “Because we’re still twice as likely to be unemployed and we’re still underpaid when we’re lucky enough to be employed.”Disability issues are likely to become more prominent in coming years because the pandemic has left potentially millions of adults dealing with a disability. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimated that close to two million working-age Americans had become disabled because of long Covid.Employers that don’t find ways to accommodate workers with disabilities — whether through remote work or other adjustments — are going to continue to struggle to find employees, said Mason Ameri, a Rutgers University business professor who studies disability.“Employers have to shape up,” he said. “Employers have to pivot. Otherwise this labor shortage may be more permanent.” More

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    Starbucks Showdown in Boston Points to New Phase of Union Campaign

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    The company moved to contain the labor push after it took off nationally. Now, with strikes and other tactics, organizers seek to regain momentum.For much of the summer, employees reliably turned up at a Starbucks near Boston University. But instead of going inside to serve coffee, they sat outside in lawn chairs — as part of a strike over what they said was retaliation for unionizing.When passers-by inquired how long the strike would last, workers responded, “As long as it has to.” Ultimately, they shut the store for more than two months, until satisfied that Starbucks would not impose new scheduling requirements in union stores that they said would force some of them to quit. Starbucks said it had told union stores for weeks that there would be no such change and denied retaliating against union supporters.The walkout was one of dozens at unionized Starbucks locations in recent months, meant partly to re-energize a labor organizing effort whose momentum has stalled since the spring and has so far yielded no contract.When workers at three Buffalo-area locations filed for union elections in August 2021, it appeared to catch the company off guard. The campaign spread rapidly, unionizing roughly 250 stores.But election filings dropped from about 70 in March to under 10 in August, ushering in a second phase of the campaign: an uneasy stalemate in which organizers struggled to sign up new stores even as the company was hard-pressed to reverse their gains.“In the context of the size of the organization as a whole, it’s a drop in the bucket,” said David Pryzbylski, a partner at the management-side firm Barnes & Thornburg, alluding to the company’s 9,000 corporate-owned locations. But he added: “Anyone who thinks it’s going back anywhere close to zero is foolish. It’s safe to assume they’ll have at least hundreds of cafes unionized going forward.”That has led to a third phase of the campaign, in which the union, Workers United, has stepped up efforts to win concessions from the company through collective bargaining, which is scheduled for the coming weeks.Some of the concessions sought by the union, like a commitment by the company to stay neutral in future elections, could make it easier for workers to unionize. Others, like paid leave tied to a pandemic, which the company has discontinued, could encourage more workers to join the union by showing it can deliver concrete benefits.But to win such concessions and greatly expand the union’s reach, labor experts say, supporters will almost certainly have to increase pressure on the company, through strikes or other means. And that has heightened the importance of a number of cities — in addition to Boston and Buffalo, places like Eugene, Ore.; Albany, N.Y.; and Ann Arbor, Mich. — where there are several unionized stores, dozens of workers willing to coordinate their actions and a community that is largely sympathetic.“Massing forces in a particular geographic region and attempting to spread the conflagration there has the potential to work,” said Peter Olney, a former organizing director of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. “I would focus on those metro areas.”One architect of the union’s strategy in Boston is a recent law school graduate named Kylah Clay, who works as a barista at a unionized store.On a blistering afternoon in August, Ms. Clay, wearing a tank top and green army pants, sat outside the Boston University store holding a stack of checks that workers came to collect, courtesy of the union’s Starbucks strike fund.In between, she recalled how she and a colleague had recently ambushed their district manager at another store after he had become slow to respond to their calls and text messages. “We went up to the district manager and started making our demands,” Ms. Clay said. As Ms. Clay tells it, she knew almost nothing about unions before last year, when company officials began pouring into Buffalo after the campaign had gone public. Among them was Howard Schultz, who was between tours as chief executive. “When Buffalo filed, Howard should have kept his mouth shut,” she said. “I would have never gotten involved.”Employees at her store, where she had first worked during law school, and another Boston-area store filed for union elections in December and won their votes in April. Since then, more than 15 stores in New England have also unionized, most of them with her help. Nationwide, the union has won about 250 out of just over 300 votes.But adding to the total has become more difficult. “Stores that are easy to organize, that had people in them who were natural leaders, who were excited about it — those have filed already,” said Brick Zurek, a former Starbucks employee in Chicago who helped organize workers there.Adjustments in the way that Starbucks treats workers have also appeared to play a role. During the early phase of the union campaign, the company generally did not fire workers involved in organizing. But this year, Starbucks began to do so more regularly — like when it fired seven workers in Memphis who were recently reinstated by a federal judge.The National Labor Relations Board issued multiple complaints against Starbucks for firing union supporters, and the agency’s judges have ruled against the company in a few cases so far.Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, denied that the company had unlawfully forced out workers, saying any increase in disciplinary action against union supporters reflected an increase in violations.In May, the company announced wage increases and new benefits, like faster sick leave accrual, that would apply only to employees of nonunion stores or those not in the process of organizing.Kylah Clay, a recent law school graduate, works at a unionized Starbucks in Boston, and she leads a committee that has helped other stores in New England organize.Tony Luong for The New York TimesJulie Langevin, a worker involved in organizing a Starbucks store near Boston that voted against the union, said several longtime employees in her store relied on Starbucks for health care and had become alarmed that unionized workers might miss out on benefits.“They were extremely concerned that they would actually lose health insurance,” Ms. Langevin said.The labor board has issued a complaint against the company for withholding new benefits and wage increases from unionized employees. Starbucks has said it is forbidden by federal law from adding certain benefits unilaterally in unionized stores.Workers United is an established union with more than 70,000 members across the United States and Canada, but has often relied on Starbucks workers to organize their own stores and plan their own labor actions.Ms. Clay leads a committee that helps New England stores organize, sending out union “starter kits” that include Starbucks Workers United T-shirts and union cards with envelopes addressed to the labor relations board. “I have one closet with 300 shirts in it,” she said in August.She also leads the region’s collective action committee, which came about after workers at a Boston-area store staged a daylong strike over a leaky roof in late May. (Starbucks said the leak had been repaired within a business day.)Six weeks later, as the committee was contemplating a series of daylong walkouts in response to the company’s withholding of new benefits from union stores, workers at the store near Boston University decided to strike. Spencer Costigan and Nora Rossi, two union leaders at the store, which is at 874 Commonwealth Avenue, said workers were fed up with what they described as retaliation for unionizing and the company’s refusal to bargain.“They texted me out of the blue and said, ‘I think we’re ready to do it,’” Ms. Clay said. “Not as many stores were interested at the time. But then they saw 874 and were like, ‘Ah, OK.’” Workers eventually waged strikes that closed five stores for one week; the strike at 874 Commonwealth sprawled across nine weeks.The actions seemed to build support for their cause. The Boston City Council passed a resolution backing the strikers, and politicians, activists, students and other union members joined the picket line at all hours of the day and night.Ms. Clay also leads the region’s collective action committee.Tony Luong for The New York TimesWorkers at the Boston University store called off the strike in late September, a few days after Starbucks posted an announcement to baristas saying stores that had unionized by early July would not be subject to a requirement that workers be available to work at least 18 hours a week. (The requirement would take effect at nonunion stores.)Ms. Rossi said that, before the workers went on strike in mid-July, their manager had pressured some union supporters to increase their availability under the new rule or leave their jobs. Other unionized workers in Massachusetts made similar complaints on a messaging app as recently as early September.Mr. Borges, the Starbucks spokesman, said the rule had never applied to union stores, citing communications to managers in July and a tweet by the Starbucks union the same month. He emphasized that the company had not negotiated with the striking workers or offered them concessions.A few days after the strike ended, Starbucks began sending letters to worker representatives at unionized stores proposing a window for bargaining in October. The union’s president, Lynne Fox, had sought to bargain on a regional or national scale as the union prepared proposals with input from thousands of workers, but the union has accepted the store-by-store approach preferred by the company. Starbucks has nonetheless continued to portray the union as resistant to store-level bargaining.The outcome of the negotiations could reverberate beyond Starbucks. In an email that Geico sent to employees in August, after some workers there began union organizing, the company emphasized that Starbucks had recently offered wage and benefit increases only to nonunion stores. Other large employers are surely watching closely as well.Ms. Clay, for one, believes the stakes are high enough that she has altered her career plans, declining a job in the local public defender’s office so she can stay at Starbucks and push for a contract.“There was some grieving to it — I spent the last five years trying to do that job,” she said. “But you have to go where the wind takes you.” More