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    Truckers’ Protests Over Labor Law Block Access to Oakland’s Port

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    For days, a convoy of truckers has blocked the roads that serve the Port of Oakland, crippling a major West Coast cargo hub already hampered by global supply chain disruptions.The protest is meant to send a message to Gov. Gavin Newsom: Keep the drivers clear of a California labor law that they say threatens their livelihood.The truckers, primarily independent owners and operators, are demonstrating in opposition to Assembly Bill 5, a law passed in 2019 that requires gig workers in several industries to be classified as employees with benefits, including minimum wage and overtime pay.Along with a coalition of trade groups, the truckers want Mr. Newsom to issue an executive order putting off the application of the 2019 law to their work and to bring labor and industry to the table to negotiate a path forward.A representative of Mr. Newsom said the state would “continue to partner with truckers and the ports to ensure the continued movement of goods to California’s residents and businesses, which is critical to all of us.”Smaller protests were organized last week at the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.In a statement, Danny Wan, executive director of the Port of Oakland, said he understood the displays of frustration. But he warned against more delays surrounding the ports, a vital link in a supply chain already hemorrhaging from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Covid-19 lockdowns in China.“Prolonged stoppage of port operations in California for any reason will damage all the businesses operating at the ports and cause California ports to further suffer market share losses to competing ports,” he said.When Mr. Newsom signed the measure into law, it received immediate rebukes from companies like Uber and Lyft, whose leaders argued that the law would change their businesses so severely that it might well destroy them.The state law codified a California Supreme Court ruling from 2018 that said, among other things, that people must be classified as employees if their work was a regular part of a company’s business.Both Uber and Lyft, along with DoorDash, quickly lobbied for a ballot measure that would allow gig economy companies to continue treating their drivers as independent contractors.California voters passed the measure, Proposition 22, in 2020, but last year a California Superior Court judge ruled that it was unconstitutional. Uber and Lyft quickly appealed and have been exempt from complying with Assembly Bill 5 while the court proceedings play out.But that wasn’t the case for the truckers. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge by California truckers, who under the new law are viewed as employees of the trucking companies they do business with.Nearly 70,000 California truck drivers work as independent owners and operators, ferrying goods from ports to distribution warehouses. Trucking companies and the protesting drivers argue — as Uber and Lyft did — that if Assembly Bill 5 is applied to them, the drivers will have less flexibility in when and how they work.Proponents of the law say the companies could simply take the drivers on as full- or part-time employees and continue to offer them flexible schedules.A majority of port truckers in California are independent operators and do not work for a single company. A smaller number of drivers are unionized and are represented primarily by the Teamsters.Matt Schrap, chief executive of the Harbor Trucking Association, a trade group for transportation companies serving West Coast ports, said the “frustration is that there is no pathway for folks to have independence.”“That frustration is boiling over into action,” Mr. Schrap said.Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, a former state lawmaker who was an architect of the labor bill, rejected the idea that applying the law to the trucking industry would be a disservice to drivers.“These truck companies have a business model that is misclassifying workers,” said Ms. Gonzalez Fletcher, who is about to take over as head of the California Labor Federation. “How they have been operating has been illegal.”The trucker protests come as the International Longshore and Warehouse Union is engaged in contract negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association, representing the shipping terminals at 29 ports from San Diego to Seattle.Farless Dailey III, president of Local 10 of the longshore union, said that for their own safety, his members were not trying to get through the truck blockade.“They don’t get paid when they don’t get in,” he said. “But we’re not going to put our members in harm’s way to pass through the line of truckers.”Officials at the port said the largest marine terminal had been closed since Monday because of the protests. Three other smaller terminals have operated, but with a limited capacity.Christopher S. Tang, a distinguished professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management, who studies supply chains, said the shutdowns at the Port of Oakland should not — for now — cause major issues for consumers.“The impact will not be significant in the short term,” he said. “Many retailers have stockpiled inventory.”On Thursday, German Ochoa, a trucker who lives in Oakland, arrived at the port, as he had every day this week.As horns from semitrucks blared in the background, Mr. Ochoa said by phone that he was standing shoulder to shoulder with other truckers. Some held poster boards that read, “Take down AB 5!!!” and “AB 5 Has Got to Go!,” he said.“This is taking away my independence,” Mr. Ochoa said. “It’s my right to be an independent driver.”Noam Scheiber More

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    Chipotle Closes Maine Store Looking to Unionize, Workers Say

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    Workers who filed for a union election at a Chipotle in Augusta, Maine, are accusing the company of seeking to undermine their campaign by closing the restaurant.The company notified employees of the closing on Tuesday morning, hours before the two sides were scheduled to take part in a hearing before the National Labor Relations Board about the possible election.“We have been unable to adequately staff this remote restaurant,” Laurie Schalow, the company’s chief corporate affairs officer, said in a statement. Ms. Schalow added that “because of these ongoing staffing challenges, there is no probability of reopening in the foreseeable future, so we’ve made the decision to permanently close the restaurant.”A lawyer representing the workers filed a charge with the labor board contending that the closing was an illegal act of retaliation.“I’m referring to this as Union Busting 101,” said the lawyer, Jeffrey Neil Young, who frequently represents unions in the state. “It’s a classic response — employees decide to organize and the employer says it’s closing the store.”Read More on Organized Labor in the U.S.Apple: Employees at a Baltimore-area Apple store voted to unionize, making it the first of the company’s 270-plus U.S. stores to do so. The result provides a foothold for a budding movement among Apple retail employees.Starbucks: When a Rhodes scholar joined Starbucks in 2020, none of the company’s 9,000 U.S. locations had a union. She hoped to change that by helping to unionize its stores in Buffalo. Improbably, she and her co-workers have far exceeded their goal.Amazon: A little-known independent union scored a stunning victory at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. But unlike at Starbucks, where organizing efforts spread in a matter of weeks, unionizing workers at Amazon has been a longer, messier slog.A Shrinking Movement: Although high-profile unionization efforts have dominated headlines recently, union membership has seen a decades-long decline in the United States.The labor board will investigate the charge and issue a formal complaint if it finds merit in the accusation, at which point the case would go before an administrative law judge. The two sides could reach a settlement beforehand.A handful of workers at the store walked off the job in mid-June to protest what they said were unsafe conditions that stemmed from understaffing and insufficient training.“Not being properly trained to prepare food has a lot of risks to both the preparer and the people eating the food,” said Brandi McNease, a worker involved in the walkout and the union campaign. “You worry about knife skills, using equipment that is dangerous — hot, sharp.”Within a few days, the company closed the store to the public while it sought to improve staffing, including retaining two recruiting experts, according to Ms. Schalow. During this time, workers continued to report to the store, where they received some training and helped clean it, but often for fewer hours a week than they previously worked.On June 22, workers filed a petition to hold a union election. The labor board requires at least 30 percent of workers to indicate their support before it will order one.The hearing scheduled for Tuesday was meant to consider arguments from the two sides about the proposed election. Chipotle had asserted in filings that the election should not go forward, partly because the store was understaffed and so the workers eligible to vote would not be fully representative of its eventual work force.Mr. Young, the lawyer representing the workers, said the closing could chill organizing efforts at other stores in the chain, including those underway in Lansing, Mich., where workers have also filed for a union election, and New York City.“By closing the Augusta store, it’s signaling to Chipotle workers elsewhere who are involved in or contemplating nascent organizational drives that if you organize, you might be out of job,” Mr. Young said.Ms. Schalow, the Chipotle official, said in her statement that closing the store “has nothing to do with union activity.” The company said it had closed 13 locations out of about 3,000 because of staffing issues, performance, lease agreements and other business reasons over the past 18 months. Most of the closings appear to have come in the first half of last year.Chipotle has offered the Augusta workers four weeks of severance pay based on their hours over the past two weeks, which have typically been lower than before the restaurant closed to the public. It has not offered to place the workers at other locations in Maine, the nearest of which is roughly an hour away, according to the company.Ms. McNease said she and her co-workers planned to fight to have the store reopened. “No one is bailing now,” she said.Chipotle is among several employers in the service industry whose workers have sought to unionize over the past year. Roughly 200 corporate-owned Starbucks locations have voted to unionize since last fall, as have workers at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island, an REI store in Manhattan and an Apple store in Maryland.The labor board has formally accused Starbucks of closing certain stores in retaliation for union organizing. The company has denied the accusations.Last week, Starbucks said it was closing 16 additional stores because of safety concerns like crime, which it said have been reflected in incident reports over the past year. The union representing the newly unionized Starbucks workers has filed charges of unfair labor practices, accusing the company of closing the stores to undermine organizing activity or avoid bargaining with unionized workers. More

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    America’s Safety Net for Workers Hurt by Globalization Is Falling Apart

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    A 60-year-old program that provides retraining to workers whose jobs are eliminated because of foreign competition has expired, leaving many at risk.WASHINGTON — In September, the lighting factory in Logan, Ohio, where Jeff Ogg has clocked in nearly every day for the last 37 years, will shut its doors, driven out of business by a shift from fluorescent lighting toward LED technology that is often made cheaply in China.At 57, Mr. Ogg is not yet ready to retire. But when he applied to a national retraining program that helps workers who have lost their jobs to foreign competition, he was dismayed to see his application rejected. A follow-up request for reconsideration was immediately denied.The program that Mr. Ogg looked to for help, known as Trade Adjustment Assistance, has for the past 60 years been America’s main antidote to the pressures that globalization has unleashed on its workers. More than five million workers have participated in the program.But a lack of congressional funding has put the program in jeopardy: Trade assistance was officially terminated on July 1, though it continues to temporarily serve current enrollees. Unless Congress approves new money for the $700 million program, it will cease to exist entirely.Established in 1962, trade assistance was intended to help workers whose factory and other jobs were increasingly moving overseas as companies chased cheap labor outside the United States. It provides services like subsidies for retraining, job search assistance, health coverage tax credits and allowances for relocation.But the benefits have been gradually scaled back given a lack of funding, including limiting who qualifies for assistance. A year ago, the program was restricted to workers who make goods, even though jobs in services have also undergone a wave of offshoring as companies set up call centers and accounting departments overseas. In addition, only those whose jobs shifted to countries that have a free-trade agreement with the United States — like Canada and Mexico, but not China — were eligible for assistance.On July 1, the program stopped reviewing new applications and appeals from workers whose applications have been rejected, and it will be phased out.While often criticized as inefficient and bureaucratic, the program has been the country’s primary answer to trade competition for decades. Its disappearance may leave thousands of workers without critical support as they seek new jobs. In 2021, the Department of Labor certified 801 petitions for trade adjustment assistance from various workplaces, covering an estimated 107,454 American workers.The decision over whether to reauthorize the program has become a casualty of an intense fight in Congress over what to include in a sprawling bill aimed at making America more competitive with China. The centerpiece of the legislation is $52 billion in funding for semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, but lawmakers have been clashing over whether to include other provisions related to trade, such as funding for worker retraining.House Democrats had proposed including other trade provisions as well, including measures to increase scrutiny on investments that might send American technology overseas and eliminate tariff exemptions for small-value goods imported from China.The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob gains continue to maintain their impressive run, easing worries of an economic slowdown but complicating efforts to fight inflation.June Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 372,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6 percent ​​in the sixth month of 2022.Care Worker Shortages: A lack of child care and elder care options is forcing some women to limit their hours or has sidelined them altogether, hurting their career prospects.Downsides of a Hot Market: Students are forgoing degrees in favor of the attractive positions offered by employers desperate to hire. That could come back to haunt them.Slowing Down: Economists and policymakers are beginning to argue that what the economy needs right now is less hiring and less wage growth. Here’s why.On Tuesday, the Senate voted to advance a smaller legislative package that includes funding for the chips industry and broader research and development, but lacks funding for Trade Adjustment Assistance or other trade-related measures. The chips legislation will still require further approval in both the House and Senate.Supporters of Trade Adjustment Assistance say that they will not stop pushing for its reauthorization, and that funding for the program could still be included in other legislation.Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat from Ohio, blamed Republican lawmakers for “holding T.A.A. hostage” and said he would continue fighting to reauthorize the program.“They have sold out American manufacturing over and over by voting for trade deals and tax policy that send jobs overseas, and continue to block investments to empower workers who lose their jobs because of those bad trade deals,” Mr. Brown said in emailed remarks. “T.A.A. serves workers — like those in Logan, Ohio — who have their lives upended through no fault of their own.”The program and its benefits are already out of reach for Mr. Ogg and 50 others who work at the Logan plant, which manufactures the glass tubes in fluorescent lighting fixtures that were once ubiquitous in schools and offices. The plant tried to transition to making LED lights in recent years, but found those lights could be purchased more cheaply from abroad.“Our plant, our people, most of them have been there 25-plus years,” said Mr. Ogg, who is the president of the local United Steelworkers union. “You work in the same place that long, that’s all you know.”Mr. Ogg said he had no complaints about his career at the plant, where he estimates the average wage is between $25 and $30 an hour — enough for him to buy a home and raise three children. But he’s feeling unsure about what to do next. He previously worked as a mechanic, but said the type of machinery that he had worked on was no longer around.“A lot has changed,” Mr. Ogg added. “If you’ve been stuck in one place for 30-some years, you’re going to need some help to go to the next level.”Trade Adjustment Assistance was intended to do just that — help workers who need new skills to compete in a more globalized economy. The program offered income support to workers who lost their jobs and exhausted unemployment benefits while they retrained for other jobs. Those who are 50 and older and take on lower-paying jobs could qualify for a wage insurance program that temporarily boosted their take-home pay.Some academic research has found benefits for those who enrolled in the program. Workers gave up about $10,000 in income while training, but 10 years later they had about $50,000 higher cumulative earnings than those who did not retrain, according to research from 2018 by Benjamin G. Hyman, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.Still, those relative gains decayed over time, Mr. Hyman’s research shows. After 10 years the incomes of those who received assistance and those who did not were the same — perhaps because the jobs that workers in T.A.A. trained for had also become obsolete as a result of automation and trade competition. Yet Mr. Hyman concluded that earnings returns from the program “may be larger and more effective than previously thought.”The United Steelworkers Local 1999 in Indianapolis, which fought to save manufacturing jobs from companies like Rexnord, which moved its operations to Mexico in 2017.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThe program fell victim to concerns over its expense and efficiency, as well as what was left out of the broader package of trade legislation. In the past, the funding for the program was coupled with something called Trade Promotion Authority, which streamlined the process for congressional approval of U.S. trade agreements.The combination of Trade Promotion Authority and Trade Adjustment Assistance was a political formula that worked for decades, said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Fore­­­ign Relations. Presidents promised businesses more access to foreign markets, and they made commitments to providing labor unions and their supporters with compensation if jobs were lost in the process.But American views on trade have turned more negative in recent years, as China began dominating global industries and as income inequality widened. Democrats have grown so disillusioned with the effects of global trade and split over its benefits that the Biden administration has declined to push for new pacts.Before writing any new trade deals, Mr. Biden said he would first focus on boosting American competitiveness, including by investing in infrastructure, clean energy, and research and development. And when Trade Promotion Authority expired last year, Biden administration officials did not lobby Congress to reauthorize it.Some Republicans are balking at reapproving trade adjustment assistance when the president shows little intention to open up new overseas business opportunities through trade agreements.“America’s on the sidelines right now on trade, and President Biden’s moratorium on new trade agreements seems firm,” Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas, told reporters late last month. “There would have to be a much stronger ironclad commitment to resuming American leadership in trade to even begin this discussion on extending T.A.A.”“We’re open to creative ideas here, but if we don’t have a serious, significant trade agenda that opens up markets for American workers, T.A.A. doesn’t make much sense,” Mr. Brady added.Mr. Biden’s plans to boost American competitiveness have only been partly fulfilled. While Congress approved billions of dollars for new infrastructure investments, other aspects of the president’s domestic agenda, including funding for the energy transition, have crumbled. Lawmakers have struggled to amass the support even for legislation in favor of expanded funding for the semiconductor industry, which is widely seen as key to American industry and national security.With so many other legislative goals at stake, the termination of a decades-old solution to the economic trade-offs of free trade has garnered little attention.“The old consensus on trade is gone,” said Mr. Alden of the Council on Foreign Relations. “And we don’t have a new one.”Catie Edmondson More

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    Strong Wage and Jobs Growth Keeps Fed on Track for Big Rate Increase

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    The Federal Reserve is trying to cool down the economy to bring inflation under control, but the job market is still going strong.A surprisingly robust June employment report reinforced that America’s labor market remains historically strong even as recession warnings reach a fever pitch. But that development, while good news for the Biden administration, is likely to keep the Federal Reserve on its aggressive path of interest rate increases as it tries to cool the economy and slow inflation.Today’s world of rapid price increases is a complicated one for economic policymakers, who are worried that an overheating job market could exacerbate persistent inflation. Instead of viewing roaring demand for labor as an unmitigated good, they are hoping to engineer a gradual and controlled slowdown in hiring and wage growth, both of which remain unusually strong. Friday’s report offered early signs that the desired cooling is taking hold as both job gains and pay increases moderated slightly. But hiring and earnings remained solid enough to reinforce the view among Fed officials that the labor market, like much of the economy, is out of whack: Employers still want far more workers than are available. The new data will likely keep central bankers on track to make another supersize rate increase at their meeting later this month as they try to restrain consumer and business spending and force the economy back into balance. “We’re starting to see those first signs of slowdown, which is what we need,” Raphael Bostic, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, said in a CNBC interview after the report was released. Still, he called the wage data “only slightly” reassuring and said that “we’re starting to inch in the right direction, but there’s still a lot more to do, and a lot more we’ll have to see.”Fed officials began to raise interest rates from nearly zero in March in an attempt to make borrowing of many kinds more expensive. Last month, the central bank lifted its policy rate by 0.75 percentage points, the largest single increase since 1994. Central bankers typically adjust their policy only in quarter-point increments, but they have been picking up the pace as inflation proves disturbingly rapid and stubborn. While Fed policymakers have said they will debate a move between 0.5 or 0.75 percentage points at their meeting on July 26 and 27, a chorus of officials have in recent days said they would support a second 0.75 percentage point move given the speed of inflation and strength of the job market.As the Fed tries to tap the brakes on the economy, Wall Street economists have warned that it may instead slam it into a recession — and the Biden administration has been fending off declarations that one is already arriving. A slump in overall growth data, a pullback in the housing market and a slowdown in factory orders have been fueling concern that America is on the brink of a downturn. Construction workers in New York City. Employers added 372,000 workers in June.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe employment data powerfully contradicted that narrative, because a shrinking economy typically does not add jobs, let alone at the current brisk pace. Mr. Biden celebrated the report on Friday, saying that “our critics said the economy was too weak” but that “we still added more jobs in the past three months than any administration in nearly 40 years.”Private sector voices concurred that the employment report showed an economy that did not appear to be tanking. “Wage growth remains elevated and rates of job loss are low,” Nick Bunker, economic research director at the job website Indeed, wrote in a reaction note. “We’ll see another recession some day, but today is not that day.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob gains continue to maintain their impressive run, easing worries of an economic slowdown but complicating efforts to fight inflation.June Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 372,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6 percent ​​in the sixth month of 2022.Care Worker Shortages: A lack of child care and elder care options is forcing some women to limit their hours or has sidelined them altogether, hurting their career prospects.Downsides of a Hot Market: Students are forgoing degrees in favor of the attractive positions offered by employers desperate to hire. That could come back to haunt them.Slowing Down: Economists and policymakers are beginning to argue that what the economy needs right now is less hiring and less wage growth. Here’s why.The contradictory moment in the economy — with prices rising fast, economic growth contracting and the unemployment rate hovering near a 50-year low — has posed a challenge for Mr. Biden, who has struggled to convey sympathy for consumers struggling with higher prices while seeking credit for the strength of the jobs recovery. Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have slumped as price growth has accelerated. Confidence has taken an especially pronounced battering in recent months amid rising gas prices, which topped $5 a gallon on average earlier this summer. On Friday, Mr. Biden emphasized that fighting inflation was his top economic priority while also praising recent job market progress. “I know times are tough,” Mr. Biden said, speaking in public remarks. “Prices are too high. Families are facing a cost-of-living crunch. But today’s economic news confirms the fact that my economic plan is moving this country in a better direction.” But unfortunately for the administration and for workers across America, tackling high prices will probably come at some cost to the labor market. As price increases bedevil consumers at the gas pump and in the grocery aisle, the Fed believes that it needs to bring inflation under control swiftly in order to set the economy on a path toward healthy and sustainable growth. The Fed’s tool to achieve that positive long-term outcome works by causing short-term economic pain. By making money expensive to borrow, the central bank can slow down home buying and business expansions, which will in turn slow hiring and wage increases. As companies and families have fewer dollars to spend, the theory goes, demand will come into better alignment with supply and prices will stop rocketing higher. Officials expect unemployment to eventually tick up as rate increases bite and the economy weakens, though they are hoping that it will only rise slightly. Fed policymakers are still hoping to engineer what they often call a “soft landing,” in which hiring and pay gains slow gradually, but without plunging the economy into a painful recession. But pulling it off will not be easy — and officials are willing to clamp down harder if that is what it takes to tame inflation. “Price stability is absolutely essential for the economy to achieve its potential and sustain maximum employment over the medium term,” John C. Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in a speech in Puerto Rico on Friday. “I want to be clear: This is not an easy task. We must be resolute, and we cannot fall short.”Federal funds rate since January 1998

    Rate is the federal funds target rate until Dec. 15, 2008, and thereafter it is the upper limit of the federal funds target rate range.Source: The Federal ReserveBy The New York TimesStocks fell after the release of the employment numbers, likely because investors saw them as a sign that the Fed would continue constraining the economy.“The tremendous momentum in the economy to me suggests that we can move at 75 basis points at the next meeting and not see a lot of protracted damage to the broader economy,” Mr. Bostic said Friday.Fed officials are closely watching wage data in particular. Average hourly earnings climbed by 5.1 percent in the year through June, down slightly from 5.3 percent the prior month. Wages for non-managers climbed by a swift 6.4 percent from a year earlier. While that pace of increase is slowing somewhat, it is still much higher than normal — and could keep inflation elevated if it persists, as employers charge more to cover climbing labor costs.“Wages are not principally responsible for the inflation that we’re seeing, but going forward, they would be very important, particularly in the service sector,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said at his news conference in June.“If you don’t have price stability, the economy’s really not going to work the way it’s supposed to,” he added later. “It won’t work for people — their wages will be eaten up.”Wage growth may be slowing in retail and hospitality jobs.Percent change in earnings for nonmanagers since January 2019 by sector More

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    U.S. Economy Added 372,000 Jobs in June, Defying Slowdown Fears

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    The strong Labor Department report comes as consumers and businesses express increasing concern about a downturn.The U.S. economy powered through June with broad-based hiring on par with recent months, keeping the country clear of recession territory even as inflation eats into wages and interest rates continue to rise. Employers added 372,000 jobs, the Labor Department reported Friday, and the unemployment rate, at 3.6 percent, was unchanged from May and near a 50-year low. Washington and Wall Street had keenly awaited the new data after a series of weaker economic indicators. The June job growth exceeded economists’ forecasts by roughly 100,000, offering some reassurance that a sharper downturn isn’t underway — at least not yet. But the strength of the report, which also showed bigger wage gains than expected, could give the Federal Reserve more leeway for tough medicine to beat back inflation. Now, all eyes will be watching whether the Fed’s strategy of raising interest rates pushes the country into a recession that inflicts harsh pain. Employment growth over the last three months averaged 375,000, a solid showing though a drop from a monthly pace of 539,000 in the first quarter of this year. Employers have continued to hang on to workers in recent months, with initial unemployment claims rising only slightly from their low point in March.The private sector has now regained its prepandemic employment level — an achievement trumpeted by the White House on Friday — though the level is still below what would have been expected absent the pandemic. Other than the public sector, no broad industry lost jobs in June, on a seasonally adjusted basis.“We’ve essentially ground our way back to where we were pre-Covid,” said Christian Lundblad, a professor of finance at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina. “So, this doesn’t necessarily look like a dire situation, despite the fact that we’re struggling with inflation and economic declines in some other dimensions.”Strong demand for workers is also evident in the 11.3 million jobs that employers had open in May, a number that remains close to record highs and leaves nearly two jobs available for every person looking for work. In this equation, any workers laid off as certain sectors come under strain are more likely to find new jobs quickly. The Labor Department’s broadest measure of labor force underutilization — which includes part-time workers who want more hours and people who have been discouraged from job hunting — sank to its lowest rate since the household survey took its current form in 1994, a sign that employers are maximizing their existing work force as hiring remains difficult. The education and health sector gained the most jobs in June.Change in jobs, by sector More

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    Private-sector employment has recovered to prepandemic levels.

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    Job growth in June was driven by industries recuperating from pandemic-induced losses, and continued business investment in sectors still benefiting from formidable demand for their goods and services, even as borrowing costs increase.Employment is now just a touch away from prepandemic levels, down 524,000, or 0.3 percent, from February 2020. A recovery in private-sector job creation is responsible for the overall gains. Government employment has lagged, with a shortfall of 664,000. Job growth in educational services was solid, seasonally adjusted, suggesting that employment in that sector fell less than usual at the start of summer.A recent wave of layoffs in the tech and housing sectors have made headlines, yet employment in professional and business services is 880,000 above its February 2020 level, and overall hiring last month showed no sign of slowing.“High inflation and a shift of consumer spending from goods to services is causing job losses in some sectors of the economy, but most workers who are losing jobs are finding new ones quickly,” said Bill Adams, the chief economist for Comerica Bank, a large commercial bank based in Dallas.With the large baby boomer population continuing to age, demand for health care workers is growing and the sector added 57,000 jobs in June, leaving it 1.1 percent below its prepandemic levels.There was also a significant pickup in jobs at child care centers, good news for a sector that has faced a particular labor shortage. Though labor force participation in the economy overall was mostly flat compared with May.Leisure and hospitality businesses, which are benefiting from an early summer surge in travel, dining and entertainment, added 67,000 jobs, including 41,000 in food services and drinking places — a welcome boost to the sector, which is still 1.3 million jobs short of its prepandemic employment level. More

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    Amazon Hub in Newark Is Canceled After Unions and Local Groups Object

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    The e-commerce giant planned to build an airport cargo center, hire 1,000 workers and invest hundreds of millions of dollars over 20 years.For the second time, plans by Amazon to substantially expand its presence in the New York area have been abandoned after labor and community groups mobilized in opposition.In 2019, Amazon abruptly canceled plans to build a second headquarters in New York City after facing a barrage of criticism that it did not anticipate. This time, the e-commerce giant was unable to complete a deal for a cargo hub at Newark Liberty International Airport.The project, which hinged on a 20-year lease worth hundreds of millions of dollars, attracted opposition after the Port Authority disclosed it last summer.“Unfortunately, the Port Authority and Amazon have been unable to reach an agreement on final lease terms and mutually concluded that further negotiations will not resolve the outstanding issues,” Huntley Lawrence, the Port Authority’s chief operating officer, said in a statement on Thursday.Advocacy groups and unions involved had said they could not support the lease unless Amazon made a set of concessions that included labor agreements and a zero-emissions benchmark at the facility.“This victory signals that if Amazon wants to continue growing in New Jersey, it’s going to have to do it on our terms,” said Sara Cullinane, director of Make the Road New Jersey, an advocacy group that had questioned the deal.Amazon, which expressed confidence in May that the deal would close, expressed disappointment in a statement, adding that “we’re proud of our robust presence in New Jersey and look forward to continued investments in the state.”Amazon had estimated that the project would create more than 1,000 jobs, though many of those jobs could still be created if the Port Authority awards the lease to another company. Two other companies bid on the project.“The growth of air cargo and the redevelopment of airport facilities in a manner that benefits the region as well as the local community remain a top priority of the Port Authority,” Mr. Lawrence, the chief operating officer, added in his statement.The bigger long-term impact may be on Amazon’s ability to deliver packages efficiently in the Northeast, which it serves with airport hubs near Allentown, Pa.; Hartford, Conn.; and Baltimore. “Newark was the obvious choice,” said Marc Wulfraat, an industry consultant who closely tracks Amazon’s facilities. “It is right there on the doorstep of New York City.”Understand the Unionization Efforts at AmazonBeating the Giant: A homegrown, low-budget push to unionize at a Staten Island warehouse led to a historic labor victory. (Workers at another nearby Amazon facility rejected joining a similar effort shortly after.)Retaliation: Weeks after the landmark win, Amazon fired several managers in Staten Island. Some saw it as retaliation for their involvement in the unionization efforts.Diverging Outcomes: Why has a union campaign at Starbucks spread so much further than at the e-commerce giant?Amazon’s Approach: The company has countered unionization efforts with mandatory “training” sessions that carry clear anti-union messages.Mr. Wulfraat said Amazon could look for other commercial airports in the region, even if their locations were less ideal, to support the growing package volume.It was in part the company’s prominence in the state that attracted opposition to the project. A report produced by groups seeking to block it pointed out that the number of Amazon facilities in New Jersey grew to 49 from one between 2013 and 2020, helping to nearly triple the number of warehouse workers in the state, to about 70,000. Over the same period, the average wage for those workers fell to about $44,000 per year from over $53,000 per year, adjusting for inflation, according to Labor Department data.New Jersey is one of the more unionized states in the country, while Amazon has opposed unionization efforts at its facilities.Amazon said that average starting pay for its hourly workers is more than $18 nationally. The median hourly wage in New Jersey was about $23 last year. The company also cited its benefits, including full health coverage for full-time employees as soon as they start working; a 401(k) plan with a 50 percent company match; and up to 20 weeks of paid parental leave.The Port Authority revealed the proposed lease with Amazon in August, the day its board voted to authorize the deal. The authority said that it expected the lease to take effect on or around Nov. 1, according to minutes of the meeting.“It was something that they were trying to slip in without notifying the community, which was quite unfortunate,” said Kim Gaddy, executive director of the South Ward Environmental Alliance, which focuses on environmental issues affecting Newark residents. Under the proposed deal, Amazon tentatively committed to investing $125 million in renovating two buildings at the airport, and to paying the Port Authority more than $300 million over 20 years — including $150 million up front.Amazon’s plan for the Newark hub involved renovating two buildings at the airport.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesBy September, the groups led by Ms. Cullinane and Ms. Gaddy, along with other advocacy groups and unions like the Teamsters and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, began to coordinate their opposition. The groups circulated petitions that collected thousands of signatures from residents and staged public events like rallies and a march.The project appeared to stall after the November timetable for finalizing the lease passed without any announcement.In late March, a spokeswoman for Gov. Phil Murphy, who had initially praised the deal, said in a statement that “the governor encourages anyone doing business in our state to work collaboratively with labor partners in good faith.” (The governor’s office declined to comment on Thursday.) Other politicians in the state appeared to grow skeptical after the Amazon Labor Union’s election victory this year at a Staten Island warehouse, a result Amazon is contesting.Amazon uses an airport facility in Allentown, Pa., to serve the surrounding region, but it has outgrown the capacity.Mark Makela/ReutersAmazon has opened air hubs in recent years to move products through its own logistics network, rather than rely on outside providers. It prefers to fulfill customer orders with local inventory, for cheaper, quicker delivery, but when the product a customer wants is not in a nearby warehouse, it will fly the product to meet its shipping promises.Its operations expansion went into overdrive during the pandemic as e-commerce sales boomed. “We doubled our capacity that we built in the first 25 years of Amazon in just 24 months,” Andy Jassy, the chief executive, told investors in May.But the company has acknowledged that it overbuilt, expanding and hiring more than demand required, and in April it posted its first quarterly loss since 2015. This year Amazon has pulled back from some investments. “We’re trying to defer building activity on properties where we just don’t need the capacity yet, and we’re going let some leases expire as well,” Mr. Jassy said. More

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    in Economy

    Jobs Aplenty, but a Shortage of Care Keeps Many Women From Benefiting

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    A lack of child care and elder care options has forced some women to limit their hours or sidelined them altogether, hurting their career prospects.A dearth of child care and elder care choices is causing many women to reorganize their working lives and prompting some to forgo jobs altogether, hurting the economy at a moment when companies are desperate to hire, and forcing trade-offs that could impair careers.Care workers have left the industry in large numbers amid the pandemic, shrinking the number of nursery and nursing home employees by hundreds of thousands. At the same time, coronavirus outbreaks have led to intermittent school shutdowns, which, in turn, have made care demands less predictable and increased the need for reliable backup options.Although plenty of men have also taken on increased care duties since the pandemic began, women perform most caregiving in America, according to the Labor Department. They have made a surprising return to the labor market in spite of that challenge.Federal data shows that the share of women participating in the labor market by working, or by looking for jobs, remains depressed relative to 2019, but it has recovered roughly as much as the share for men has. Mothers still work less than other women, but the gap between the two has narrowed to about the level that prevailed before the pandemic, an analysis by the Federal Reserve found.Yet those signs of a comeback hide strains beneath the surface. A deeper dive into the Labor Department’s monthly survey of households shows that unmarried women without college degrees who have young children have returned to work more slowly than others, a sign that the shortage of care is making them particularly vulnerable.Self-employment has also surged among mothers, suggesting that many women are finding ways to make work more flexible as they scramble to balance care responsibilities with their need to earn money. Other women talk about putting in fewer hours and juggling increased workloads.In February, about 39 percent of women with children younger than 5 told Stanford’s RAPID Survey that they had quit their jobs or reduced their hours since the pandemic began, up from 33 percent at the same time last year. More than 90 percent of those women said they did so of their own accord, not because they were laid off or had their hours cut. Last year, that number was 65 percent.Change in women’s employment rate since Jan. 2020

    Notes: Three-month rolling average of seasonally adjusted data for women ages 20-44. “Young children” are under age 5. Women with older children not shown. College graduates have bachelor’s degrees.Source: Current Population Survey via IPUMSBy The New York TimesThose forced to cut back on work could face lasting disadvantages. They are missing out on an unusual moment of worker power, in which many employees are bargaining for higher wages or switching to more lucrative jobs. Right now, the fields where women are most concentrated — including service sector jobs in hospitality and health care — have some of the most openings and the most rapid pay growth.“I think it will be really interesting to see what the long-term consequences are on mothers’ career opportunities,” said Ariane Hegewisch, the program director in employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “Women have continued to work, but they clearly had to cut back.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob gains continue to maintain their impressive run, even as government policymakers took steps to cool the economy and ease inflation.May Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 390,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6 percent ​​in the fifth month of 2022.Downsides of a Hot Market: Students are forgoing degrees in favor of the attractive positions offered by employers desperate to hire. That could come back to haunt them.Slowing Down: Economists and policymakers are beginning to argue that what the economy needs right now is less hiring and less wage growth. Here’s why.Opportunities for Teenagers: Jobs for high school and college students are expected to be plentiful this summer, and a large market means better pay.America’s long-running caregiving shortage, for both children and older adults, was compounded by the pandemic.The professional caregiving work force — also disproportionately female — hasn’t recovered. More than one child care worker in 10 hasn’t returned, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (although that data may not capture all the single-employee, home-based operators that make up a huge part of the sector). The number of nursing home workers remains 11.5 percent below its level in February 2020. Together, the two categories represent a loss of 500,000 jobs.“For women, that’s the double whammy — most of those workers are women, and most of the people who need those supports to enter the work force themselves are women,” said Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow with the National Partnership for Women and Families.At the same time, there is new demand for care. After a decrease in the number of births early in the pandemic, nearly 3.7 million people were born last year, up 1 percent from 2020 and the first such increase since 2014.Christy Charny, a college administrative assistant in Fort Collins, Colo., recently talked to her manager about dialing back her hours from full time to part time. She likes her job and needs it for the health insurance it provides, but her 12-week-old daughter was having trouble nursing, and paying for full-time infant care was a nonstarter for her and her husband.“There is no way that we can afford $1,500 a month for child care on our full-time salaries,” said Ms. Charny, 32. “We would go into debt just so that I could work full time.”For a while, she was struggling to find any child care at all. She couldn’t afford full-time help, and the day care center where she had put down a deposit wouldn’t give her a discount if she used it only part time. She was frantically looking for other options when good news arrived: The most affordable nursery in her area, where she had been on the waiting list since October 2021, had a part-time opening.The days — Tuesday, Thursday and Friday — were not exactly right for her professional schedule, but the place was just $246 per week, so she was going to try it.“I know we can make it work if we’re careful and we cut back on other expenses,” she said. Ms. Charny’s husband sells shoes at REI, and together they make about $60,000 before taxes.Economists have long identified a lack of available and affordable child care as a reason that American women do not work more, sometimes by comparing the United States with Canada — which is economically similar in many ways but has more generous child care and parental leave policies and a higher rate of female employment. The same is true for parts of Europe.“Until 1995, the U.S. was the world’s leader in terms of female labor force participation,” said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard. “Now, this host of countries that we used to think were backward in terms of gender norms have exceeded the U.S.”And it is no surprise that the burden of care without professional help falls on workers with less education, who tend to earn less.There is a “financial trade-off between work and child care” that hinges on “what share of your income that child care eats up,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “It’s a much smaller share if you’re a working professional with a six-figure salary than if you are working a restaurant job and barely clearing $30,000.”Stanford’s RAPID Survey also showed that most mothers who cut back on work did so even though they didn’t have adequate income without it. And for those staying on the job, volatility in the child care industry can add considerable stress.“If you were hanging on to an official home-based provider to take your kid so you could go to your work, and that person closed their doors, you probably couldn’t afford to stop working,” said the survey’s director, Philip Fisher. “So you’d have to rely on anything you could pull together.”As some mothers pull back, there are implications for the economy. Employers are missing a key source of labor at a time when they have nearly two job openings for every unemployed person.Washington has tried to offset the problem to allow more parents to return to work. The American Rescue Plan, enacted last year, supplied $39 billion to help child care providers stay open, and probably prevented even larger reductions in care. Some states have supplemented that money, while others have relaxed licensing requirements and allowed a bigger ratio of children to care providers.The White House’s Build Back Better legislation included $400 billion for child care and prekindergarten, and a recent study by a team of economists estimated a similar plan could raise the rate at which mothers are employed by six percentage points. But the legislation floundered as concerns about spending mounted.Finding care for older adults also grew more difficult after Covid-19 ripped through nursing homes and sent nurses fleeing the bedside.Because of its dedicated federal funding stream, the elder care industry is larger and more formalized than the child care sector. But its work force is similarly low paid, and has gone through a harrowing time during the pandemic.Dorinda McDougald has been a clinical nursing assistant at Ellicott Center in Buffalo for 25 years.Malik Rainey for The New York TimesAccording to a recent survey conducted by ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​the American Health Care Association, a nursing home trade group, wages for nurses have increased by between 28 percent and 34 percent since the pandemic began. But only about 5 percent of the nurses who left have returned to such institutionalized settings, according to federal data. Among the challenges for such centers is the tight labor market.Dorinda McDougald is one of those who have stuck it out. She has been a clinical nursing assistant at Ellicott Center in Buffalo for 25 years and makes about $18 an hour.“I stay there for the residents, because they deserve quality care,” she said. But not everyone makes the same choice: One of Ms. McDougald’s colleagues recently left to work at a Red Lobster. “You’d have to compete with the area,” Ms. McDougald said. “Everybody else is paying $16, $17, $18.”Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that about 31 percent of nursing homes are reporting staffing shortages, which can prevent them from taking in more residents.Part of that reflects a shift toward home-based care, which both workers and patients have found safer and otherwise more appealing. Nursing home workers have also left for staffing agencies and hospitals, which offer better pay and more opportunities for advancement.Among the states reporting the most widespread staffing shortages is Minnesota, where 69 percent of nursing homes say they don’t have enough caregivers. That state has a higher-than-average share of nonprofit facilities that depend on Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements, which the industry says have not been adjusted for the increased cost of operations.That’s where Staci Drouillard, 54, has been trying to find a place for her parents.She lives in Grand Marais, on Lake Superior, two hours northeast of Duluth. Her father, who is 87 years old and a lifelong resident of the town, has dementia. Her mother, 83, cared for him until she had a series of strokes.Both parents worked, but they weren’t able to build enough savings to afford home-based care, even if a local aide were available. The county’s only nursing home has 37 beds, but six are empty because of staff vacancies, according to the facility’s chief executive.Now, the task falls to Ms. Drouillard, who goes to her parents’ house most days. After getting a promotion at the radio station where she works, she shifted to a position that is home-based, with fewer hours, lower pay and less authority, as caregiving consumed more and more of her time.“As I watched my parents’ health deteriorate and decline, I realized I needed to pivot to a job that has less responsibility,” Ms. Drouillard said. “Their care is kind of like having another job, except you don’t really know what hours you’re going to work.” More