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    West Hollywood Minimum Wage, Highest in U.S., Irks Merchants

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    Josiah Citrin, the owner and chef of a Santa Monica restaurant with two Michelin stars, opened a new steakhouse a few months ago off the Sunset Strip. He is already concerned about whether the restaurant can survive.The reason, Mr. Citrin said, is singular: a West Hollywood city mandate that workers be paid at least $19.08 an hour, the highest minimum wage in the country.“It’s very challenging,” Mr. Citrin, 55, said of the new minimum wage, which took effect about two weeks before he opened his doors in July. “Really, it’s almost impossible to operate.”His sentiment is widely shared among business owners in West Hollywood, a city of 35,000 known for restaurants, boutiques and progressive politics. In recent weeks, many owners have written to lawmakers, pleading for a moratorium on further increases to the minimum wage; another is scheduled for July, based on inflation. And last month, several marched to a local government building carrying signs that read, “My WeHo” and “R.I.P. Restaurants in West Hollywood.”Their sense of duress arises partly from geography. The jaggedly shaped city is bordered by Beverly Hills to the west and Los Angeles to the north, south and east. Some streets begin in Los Angeles, slice through West Hollywood and end in Beverly Hills. You can be in three cities — barring, of course, traffic — in a matter of minutes.And that means West Hollywood’s small businesses have competitors down the street with lower costs.Beyond raising the minimum wage, the West Hollywood ordinance, which the City Council approved in 2021, requires that all full-time employees receive at least 96 hours a year of paid time off for sick leave, vacation or other personal necessities, as well as 80 hours that they can take off without pay.The State of California’s hourly minimum wage is $15.50, the third highest in the nation, trailing only the District of Columbia at $17 and Washington State at $15.74. But just as each state’s minimum wage can supersede the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, more than two dozen cities across California, including West Hollywood and several in the Bay Area, have higher minimum wages than the state, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.The number of workers at Charcoal Sunset restaurant in West Hollywood has fallen to 35 from around 50. The owner is wondering about his future in the city.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesIn San Francisco, it’s $18.07; in Los Angeles, $16.78.Chris Tilly, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies labor markets and public policies that shape the workplace, said research had shown that gradual and moderate increases to the minimum wage had no significant impact on employment levels.“The claim that minimum wage increases are job-killers is overblown,” Mr. Tilly said. But “there are possible downsides,” he added. “One is that economic theory tells us an overly large increase in the minimum is bound to deter businesses from hiring.”Over the past year, workers in several California industries have seen significant pay raises due, in many instances, to wins by organized labor. Health care workers at Kaiser Permanente facilities secured a contract that includes a $25-an-hour minimum wage in the state. Fast food workers across the state will soon make a minimum wage of $20 per hour, and hotel workers have received significant pay bumps across Southern California.Until recently, West Hollywood followed the state’s minimum wage increases, which have risen every year since 2017, often by a dollar at a time. But that changed with the new ordinance, which included a series of increases.Genevieve Morrill, president of the West Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, said that while her group wanted workers to earn a living wage in an increasingly expensive part of the country, she felt that the ordinance had done more to hurt workers, who have lost hours or, in some cases, their jobs after places have shuttered.Around the time the recent wage bump took effect, Ms. Morrill helped more than 50 local businesses, including Mr. Citrin’s restaurant, write a letter to the City Council outlining their concerns. They called for a moratorium on further minimum wage increases through 2025 or until the rate aligns with the Los Angeles rate. They also asked that the city roll back the mandated paid time-off policy.West Hollywood has promoted itself as “a leader in many critical social movements.”Mark Abramson for The New York TimesA journey of mere blocks can pass through Los Angeles, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesWest Hollywood, which was incorporated in 1984, was the first city in the nation to have a City Council with a majority of members who were openly gay. It has promoted itself as “a leader in many critical social movements,” including, among other things, advocacy for H.I.V. causes, affordable housing and women’s rights, according to a post on the city’s website.When you walk along Santa Monica Boulevard, which cuts through the center of this city, a bustling energy fills the sidewalks. Several residents are catching up with phone calls while out walking their dogs, and others are grabbing a latte or strolling through an art gallery. People are doing calisthenics in a park. At night, the city’s vibrant bar and restaurant scene brings a buzz.Mayor Sepi Shyne, who was sworn in this year, said businesses had long been a part of the fabric of the community.“Our businesses are also the backbone of support for workers: Lifting workers with fair pay is part of securing economic justice and a brighter future for everyone,” said Ms. Shyne, who supports the minimum wage ordinance but said she was seriously listening to resistance from the business community.Last month, the City Council, of which Ms. Shyne is a member, approved about $2.8 million in waivers, credits and marketing dollars to help the business community. The City Council, she said, has also directed staff members to get feedback from workers about the effect of paid time off.A major supporter of the ordinance was UNITE HERE Local 11, which represents 30,000 workers at hotels and restaurants across Southern California.West Hollywood has a vibrant bar and restaurant scene that brings a buzz to the city.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesSunset Plaza is a center of various businesses on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesKurt Petersen, co-president of the local, said West Hollywood was setting a standard that should be replicated across California and the country. “It has raised living standards and given workers the security of paid time off,” he said.Near the intersection of Santa Monica and La Cienega Boulevards, Paul Leonard plans to open a location for his pet grooming business, Collar & Comb. He has operated at other locations, a few blocks away in Los Angeles, since 2019. The most popular service, Mr. Leonard said, is a full-spectrum specialty groom for dogs under 20 pounds at $166.In an interview, Mr. Leonard said he was not concerned about the minimum wage because he paid his groomers at least $23 an hour.“Everything is going up, and so should wages,” he said.Steve Lococo, who has been a part of the business community for decades, said small-business owners “have not at all been heard” over the last two years in West Hollywood. He has raised prices — an average haircut, previously $150, is now $195 — and his business, B2V Salon, which he co-owns with Alberto Borrelli, has cut back to five employees from nine. At the start of the new year, Mr. Lococo said, the salon will assess staffing again.“There need to be modifications to this ordinance,” he said. “Lately, it’s just like, you feel as if you have no say as a business owner in how things are done in the city.”Paul Leonard of Collar & Comb with his dog, Lincoln. “Everything is going up,” Mr. Leonard said, “and so should wages.”Mark Abramson for The New York TimesMeanwhile, Mr. Citrin, who has run restaurants in the Los Angeles area for more than 25 years, said the staff at his West Hollywood restaurant, Charcoal Sunset, which specializes in prime cuts of meat, had fallen to 35 from around 50.At high-end restaurants like his, Mr. Citrin noted, servers often make good money — sometimes more than $50 an hour when tips are included, he said. Most nights, his West Hollywood restaurant makes revenue comparable to what his Los Angeles and Santa Monica restaurants bring in, but his overhead costs are higher in West Hollywood. For now, he said, he is unsure of his future in the city.He often wonders if it’s easier to simply focus on his restaurants elsewhere in the area.“That’s something I need to answer in the coming months,” he said. More

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    Is Jerome Powell’s Fed Pulling Off a Soft Landing?

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    It’s too soon to declare victory, but the economic outlook seems sunnier than it did a year ago, and many economists are predicting a surprising win.The Federal Reserve appears to be creeping closer to an outcome that its own staff economists viewed as unlikely just six months ago: lowering inflation back to a normal range without plunging the economy into a recession.Plenty could still go wrong. But inflation has come down notably in recent months — it is running at 3.1 percent on a yearly basis, down from a 9.1 percent peak in 2022. At the same time, growth is solid, consumers are spending, and employers continue to hire.That combination has come as a surprise to economists. Many had predicted that cooling a red-hot job market with far more job openings than available workers would be a painful process. Instead, workers returned from the labor market sidelines to fill open spots, helping along a relatively painless rebalancing. At the same time, healing supply chains have helped to boost inventories and ease shortages. Goods prices have stopped pushing inflation higher, and have even begun to pull it down.The Fed is hoping for “a continuation of what we have seen, which is the labor market coming into better balance without a significant increase in unemployment, inflation coming down without a significant increase in unemployment, and growth moderating without a significant increase in unemployment,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said Wednesday.As Fed policymakers look ahead to 2024, they are aiming squarely for a soft landing: Officials are trying to assess how long they need to keep interest rates high to ensure that inflation is fully under control without grinding economic growth to an unnecessarily painful halt. That maneuver is likely to be a delicate one, which is why Mr. Powell has been careful to avoid declaring victory prematurely.But policymakers clearly see it coming into view, based on their economic projections. The Fed chair signaled on Wednesday that rates were unlikely to rise from their 5.25 to 5.5 percent setting unless inflation stages a surprising resurgence, and central bankers predicted three rate cuts by the end of 2024 as inflation continues to cool and joblessness rises only slightly.Consumers continue to spend, and growth in the third quarter was unexpectedly hot.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesIf they can nail that landing, Mr. Powell and his colleagues will have accomplished an enormous feat in American central banking. Fed officials have historically tipped the economy into a recession when trying to cool inflation from heights like those it reached in 2022. And after several years during which Mr. Powell has faced criticism for failing to anticipate how lasting and serious inflation would become, such a success would be likely to shape his legacy.“The Fed right now looks pretty dang good, in terms of how things are turning out,” said Michael Gapen, head of U.S. Economics at Bank of America.Respondents in a survey of market participants carried out regularly by the research firm MacroPolicy Perspectives are more optimistic about the odds of a soft landing than ever before: 74 percent said that no recession was needed to lower inflation back to the Fed’s target in a Dec. 1-7 survey, up from a low of 41 percent in September 2022.Fed staff members began to anticipate a recession after several banks blew up early this year, but stopped forecasting one in July.People were glum about the prospects for a gentle landing partly because they thought the Fed had been late to react to rapid inflation. Mr. Powell and his colleagues argued throughout 2021 that higher prices were likely to be “transitory,” even as some prominent macroeconomists warned that it might last.The Fed was forced to change course drastically as those warnings proved prescient: Inflation has now been above 2 percent for 33 straight months.Once central bankers started raising interest rates in response, they did so rapidly, pushing them from near-zero at the start of 2022 to their current range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent by July of this year. Many economists worried that slamming the brakes on the economy so abruptly would cause whiplash in the form of a recession.But the transitory call is looking somewhat better now — “transitory” just took a long time to play out.Much of the reason inflation has moderated comes down to the healing of supply chains, easing of shortages in key goods like cars, and a return to something that looks more like prepandemic spending trends in which households are buying a range of goods and services instead of just stay-at-home splurges like couches and exercise equipment.In short, the pandemic problems that the Fed had expected to prove temporary did fade. It just took years rather than months.“As a charter member of team transitory, it took a lot longer than many of us thought,” said Richard Clarida, the former Fed vice chair who served until early 2022. But, he noted, things have adjusted.Fed policies have played a role in cooling demand and keeping consumers from adjusting their expectations for future inflation, so “the Fed does deserves some credit” for that slowdown.While higher interest rates didn’t heal supply chains or convince consumers to stop buying so many sweatpants, they have helped to cool the market for key purchases like housing and cars somewhat. Without those higher borrowing costs, the economy might have grown even more strongly — giving companies the wherewithal to raise prices more drastically.Now, the question is whether inflation will continue to cool even as the economy hums along at a solid clip, or whether it will take a more marked economic slowdown to drive it down the rest of the way. The Fed itself expects growth to slow substantially next year, to 1.4 percent from 2.6 percent this year, based on fresh projections.“Certainly they’ve done very well, and better than I had anticipated,” said William English, a former senior Fed economist who is now a professor at Yale. “The question remains: Will inflation come all the way back to 2 percent without more slack in the labor and goods markets than we’ve seen so far?”To date, the job market has shown little sign of cracking. Hiring and wage growth have slowed, but unemployment stood at a historically low 3.7 percent in November. Consumers continue to spend, and growth in the third quarter was unexpectedly hot.While those are positive developments, they keep alive the possibility that the economy will have a little too much vim for inflation to cool completely, especially in key services categories.“We don’t know how long it will take to go the last mile with inflation,” said Karen Dynan, a former Treasury chief economist who teaches at Harvard. Given that, setting policy next year could prove to be more of an art than a science: If growth is cooling and inflation is coming down, cutting rates will be a fairly obvious choice. But what if growth is strong? What if inflation progress stalls but growth collapses?Mr. Powell acknowledged some of that uncertainty this week.“Inflation keeps coming down, the labor market keeps getting back into balance,” he said. “It’s so far, so good, although we kind of assume that it will get harder from here, but so far, it hasn’t.”Mr. Powell, a lawyer by training who spent a chunk of his career in private equity, is not an economist and has at times expressed caution about using key economic models and guides too religiously. That lack of devotion to the models may come in handy over the next year, Mr. Gapen of Bank of America said.It may leave the Fed chief — and the institution he leads — more flexible as they react to an economy that has been devilishly tricky to predict because, in the wake of the pandemic, past experience is proving to be a poor precedent.“Maybe it was right to have a guy who was skeptical of frameworks manage the ship during the Covid period,” Mr. Gapen said. More

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    Microsoft Agrees to Remain Neutral in Union Campaigns

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    The pledge is unprecedented for Big Tech and makes it easier for roughly 100,000 workers to unionize.Punctuating a year of major gains for organized labor, Microsoft has announced that it will stay neutral if any group of U.S.-based workers seeks to unionize.Roughly 100,000 workers would be eligible to unionize under the framework, which was disclosed Monday by Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. president, Liz Shuler, during a forum at the labor federation’s headquarters in Washington.The deal effectively broadens a neutrality agreement between Microsoft and a large union, the Communications Workers of America, under which hundreds of the company’s video game workers unionized early this year without a formal National Labor Relations Board election. Officially, it provides a framework in which any group of Microsoft workers can negotiate their own neutrality agreements with similar terms.As part of Monday’s announcement, Microsoft and the A.F.L.-C.I.O. said they would collaborate to resolve issues that arise from the adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace.Mr. Smith and Ms. Shuler said the partnership would include meetings in which artificial intelligence experts from Microsoft brief labor leaders and workers on developments in the field. Microsoft’s experts will also seek input from workers so they can develop technology in a way that addresses their concerns, such as the risk of job elimination.The two sides said they would work together to help enact policies that would prepare workers for jobs that incorporate artificial intelligence.“Never before in the history of these American tech giants, dating back 50 years or so ago, has one of these companies made a broad commitment to labor rights,” Ms. Shuler said at the forum. “It is historic. Not only have they made a commitment, they formalized it and put it in writing.”Liz Shuler, president of A.F.L.-C.I.O., noted polling that found widespread concern among workers about losing their jobs because of artificial intelligence.Susan Walsh/Associated PressWorkers’ anxiety over artificial intelligence appears to have grown over the past few years. Hollywood writers and actors cited concerns about A.I. as a key reason for their monthslong strikes this year, while Ms. Shuler pointed to recent polling showing widespread concern among workers that artificial intelligence could cost them their jobs.“I can’t sit here and say it will never displace a job,” Mr. Smith said at the forum, alluding to artificial intelligence. “I don’t think that would be honest.” But he added that “the key is to try to use it to make jobs better,” saying the technology could eliminate tasks that people consider tedious.The unveiling of the A.I. initiative comes a few weeks after the board of the start-up OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, fired the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, only to accept his reinstatement days later. The episode added to widespread concerns over how to ensure that companies develop and deploy artificial intelligence safely.Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest investor and played a role in reinstating Mr. Altman.Asked if the OpenAI controversy was an impetus for the new partnership with organized labor, Mr. Smith demurred and said the labor initiative had been in the works for months.“I wouldn’t say what happened in the board room at OpenAI changed it,” he said in an interview after Monday’s forum. “But it raised questions about how A.I. is governed and perhaps it gave even more credence to the kind of partnership we’re announcing today.”When Microsoft announced a neutrality agreement with the communications workers union in June 2022, the offer was conditional: The company was in the process of acquiring the video game maker Activision Blizzard for nearly $70 billion. Microsoft pledged to stay neutral in union elections at Activision if the acquisition succeeded. (The acquisition has since been completed.)The key to artificial intelligence, said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, is “to try to use it to make jobs better.”Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesA few months later, when roughly 300 workers sought to unionize at ZeniMax Media, a video game company owned by Microsoft, Microsoft agreed to abide by the neutrality agreement in that case as well. The agreement allowed them to indicate their preference for a union either by signing authorization cards or anonymously through an electronic platform, a more efficient process than an N.L.R.B. election.The 300 employees unionized — a rarity in Big Tech — and are negotiating a labor contract that includes language restricting the use of A.I. in their workplace.The Communications Workers of America is one of several dozen unions affiliated with the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the country’s largest labor federation. After the ZeniMax campaign, communications union officials believed that Microsoft would probably agree to stay neutral if the union sought to organize workers elsewhere at the company. But Microsoft had never explicitly agreed to do so beyond Activision or ZeniMax. More

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    Starbucks Tells Union It Wants to Resume Contract Talks

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    After the coffeehouse chain proposed terms for contract negotiations, Workers United, which represents 9,000 employees, said it was open to productive steps.Starbucks said Friday that it wanted to get back to the bargaining table after a deadlock of more than six months with the union that represents more than 9,000 of its workers.The company is proposing that bargaining continue with a set of organized stores in January, Sara Kelly, Starbucks’s vice president and chief partner officer, said in a letter to Lynne Fox, president of Workers United, the parent union of Starbucks Workers United.“We collectively agree, the current impasse should not be acceptable to either of us,” Ms. Kelly said in the letter. “It has not helped Starbucks, Workers United or, most importantly, our partners. In this spirit, we are asking for your support and agreement to restart bargaining.”Starbucks said it would like to conduct these meetings without audio or video recording “so that all participants are comfortable with open, honest discussions.” The union has previously fought for the negotiations to be conducted by videoconference so that more members could take part.Ms. Fox said in a statement that the union was reviewing the letter and still determining how to respond. “We’ve never said no to meeting with Starbucks,” she said. “Anything that moves bargaining forward in a positive way is most welcome.”Starbucks workers began organizing in 2021 with three Buffalo-area stores. Now more than 350 of the company’s roughly 9,300 corporate-owned stores in the United States are organized.In those two years, the coffee giant and its workers have sparred over issues ranging from Pride Month décor to accusations of company retaliation. The two sides have blamed each other for stalled talks since their last meeting on May 23.Most recently, workers at more than 200 stores walked out on Nov. 16, which fell on Starbucks’ promotional Red Cup Day.The union has filed hundreds of charges with the National Labor Relations Board complaining of unfair labor practices, with accusations including unjust firings and withholding certain health care benefits for organized workers. The agency itself has sided with workers in many of those disputes.The company has also sued the union over allegations of using the company’s intellectual property in pro-Palestinian messaging. More

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    U.S. Job Growth Holds Up as Economy Gradually Cools

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    Interest rate increases have taken the edge off labor demand, but unemployment dipped in November, and wages rose more than expected.The U.S. economy continued to pump out jobs in November, suggesting there is still juice left in a labor market that has been slowing almost imperceptibly since last year’s pandemic rebound.Employers added 199,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, while the unemployment rate dropped to 3.7 percent, from 3.9 percent. The increase in employment includes tens of thousands of autoworkers and actors who returned to their jobs after strikes, and others in related businesses that had been stalled by the walkouts, meaning underlying job growth is slightly weaker.Even so, the report signals that the economy remains far from recession territory despite a year and a half of interest rate increases that have weighed on consumer spending and business investment. Reinforcing the picture of energetic labor demand, wages jumped 0.4 percent over the month, more than expected, and the workweek lengthened slightly.Wage growth held steady in NovemberYear-over-year percentage change in earnings vs. inflation More

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    Amazon Is Cracking Down on Union Organizing, Workers Say

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    More than a year and a half after Amazon workers on Staten Island voted to form the company’s first union in the United States, the company appears to be taking a harder line toward labor organizing, disciplining workers and even firing one who had been heavily involved in the union campaign.The disciplinary actions come at a time when union organizers appear to be gaining ground at a major air hub operated by Amazon in Kentucky, where they say they have collected union authorization cards from at least one-quarter of hourly employees. Workers must typically demonstrate at least 30 percent support to prompt a union election.In disciplining the employees, Amazon has raised questions about the extent to which they are free to approach co-workers to persuade them to join a union, a federally protected right. The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board has said Amazon is breaking the law through a policy governing the access that off-duty workers have to its facilities, which Amazon invoked in the recent firing. The board is seeking to overturn the policy at an upcoming trial.Lisa Levandowski, an Amazon spokeswoman, said the recent disciplinary actions were strictly a response to rule violations, not to union organizing. “Employees have the choice of whether or not to join a union,” she said.The company’s off-duty access rule is “a lawful, common-sense policy,” she said, “and we look forward to defending our position.”The fired worker, Connor Spence, was a founder of the Amazon Labor Union, which won last year’s election on Staten Island. After a split within the union leadership, Mr. Spence helped start a separate group that sought to pressure the company to negotiate a contract at the warehouse, known as JFK8.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    How Has the Economy Affected You? We Want to Know.

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    The Times’s economics team is looking for reader input on what you’re going through financially and what you see in your community.The economics team at The New York Times covers everything having to do with your financial well-being: jobs, inflation, wages, taxes, inequality, government regulations, the social safety net, small businesses, large businesses, the cost of college, housing, transportation and more.We can’t do it well without understanding what Americans experience in their daily lives. That’s why we’d love for you to tell us what you’re dealing with, and what you think needs more attention.We read all submissions, often write stories inspired by them and always reach back out to ask more questions and make sure we’ve got the details right before we use them in an article. We won’t publish anything without your explicit permission, and won’t use your contact information for any other purpose or share it outside our newsroom. If you would like to submit information anonymously, please visit our tips page. More

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    DHL Workers at Kentucky Air Cargo Hub Go on Strike

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    Workers who load and unload cargo planes at DHL’s hub near Cincinnati walked out after months of negotiations failed to produce a contract.More than 1,100 workers at DHL Express’s global air cargo hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport went on strike on Thursday after months of failed negotiations with the parcel carrier.A group of DHL workers at the hub who load and unload planes voted in April to unionize with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which has been in contract negotiations with the company since July. The union has filed more than 20 unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board since then, accusing the company of retaliation against organized workers. Teamsters Local 100, which represents the unionized workers, voted to authorize a strike on Sunday.“The company forced this work stoppage, but DHL has the opportunity to right this wrong by respecting our members and coming to terms on a strong contract,” Bill Davis, president of Local 100, said in a statement.DHL Express is the U.S. unit of the world’s largest logistics company, Deutsche Post, but accounts for only 2.3 percent of the market in the United States in package volume, according to the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index. As a German company, it is not able to ship between domestic airports within the United States, so it has to contract out those services and instead focuses on handling international shipments.A DHL spokesman said the company “was fully prepared for this anticipated tactic and has enacted contingency plans” like redirecting shipments to avoid Cincinnati and adding replacement staff members.The company noted that roughly 4,000 employees at the facility were still on the job. It said it did not “anticipate any significant disruptions to our service performance.”“Unfortunately, the Teamsters decided to try and influence these negotiations and pressure the company to agree to unreasonable contract terms by taking a job action,” the company spokesman said in a statement.The DHL strike comes at a time of increased tensions in the industry between companies and organized labor.On Thursday, the Teamsters threated to strike at a United Parcel Service facility in Louisville, Ky., accusing the company of engaging in “similar practices to disrespect and abuse our members in the same state” by laying off administrative workers who had just voted to unionize. The union threatened to strike at UPS as well if it “doesn’t get its act together” by Monday.UPS narrowly averted a strike over the summer after contentious negotiations with the Teamsters, which threatened to halt operations for the country’s largest parcel service.The facility where DHL workers are striking is directly in front of Amazon’s Air Hub, where a unionization effort is underway. Workers there have accused Amazon of illegally impeding organizing efforts. More