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    Job-Hunters, Have You Posted Your Résumé on TikTok?

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    “Calling all recruiters!” Makena Yee, 21, a college student in Seattle, shouted into her camera in a recent TikTok video. “These are the reasons why you should hire me!”Ms. Yee went on to outline her qualifications. “I’m driven with confidence, I love keeping organized, I’m adaptive and I’m a team player,” she said, as images of companies she had worked for flashed up on a green screen behind her.The 60-second video quickly racked up over 182,000 views and hundreds of comments. Users tagged potential employers. “Someone hire herrrr!” one commenter implored. Ms. Yee said she had received more than 15 job leads, which she plans to pursue after a summer internship.In modern job searches, tidy one-page résumés are increasingly going the way of the fax machine. That may be accelerated by an app known for viral lip-syncing and dance videos, which is popularizing the TikTok résumé.

    @makena.yee
    Here are the reasons why YOU should hire me! Don’t be shy, let’s get in touch. #tiktokresumes #tiktokpartner ♬ original sound – MAKENA As more college students and recent graduates use TikTok to network and find work, the company has introduced a program allowing people to apply directly for jobs. And employers, many facing labor shortages, are interested. Chipotle, Target, Alo Yoga, Sweetgreen and more than three dozen other companies have started hiring people via the app.The TikTok résumé is central to these efforts. Job applicants submit videos with the hashtag #TikTokResumes and through TikTokresumes.com to show off their skills, something like a personal essay of old. They include their contact information and, if they want, their LinkedIn profile. Employers review the videos, which must be set to public, and schedule interviews with the applicants they find the most compelling.The résumés are an effort to help young people “get the bag” and get paid, Kayla Dixon, a marketing manager at TikTok who developed the program, said in a statement.They are also an outgrowth of a part of TikTok called careertok, where people share job-hunting advice, résumé tips and job opportunities. Videos with the hashtag #edutokcareer have amassed over 1.2 billion views since TikTok was introduced in the United States in 2018.But the video résumés have also raised concerns. The format strips away a level of anonymity, allowing employers to potentially dismiss candidates based on how someone looks or acts. Much of the networking on TikTok also depends on amassing views, which can be hard for those who aren’t adept at creating content or who have struggled to get equal distribution in the app’s feed.TikTok is not the first social platform that companies have sought to leverage for recruiting. LinkedIn, the professional networking site owned by Microsoft, is heavily used by both job seekers and recruiters. In 2015, Taco Bell advertised internship opportunities on Snapchat, and in 2017, McDonald’s let people apply for jobs through a Snapchat tool known as “Snaplications.” That same year, Facebook began allowing companies to post job openings to their pages and to communicate with applicants through Facebook Messenger.TikTok is now taking it further with video applications, rather than a swipe up to a more traditional application page. Though TikTok résumés are open to people of all ages, top videos submitted through the hashtag are from Gen Z users, most of whom are in college. The app said over 800 applicants had submitted TikTok résumés in the past week.“Hiring people or sourcing candidates through video just feels like a natural evolution of where we are in a society,” said Karyn Spencer, global chief marketing officer of Whalar, an influencer company that recently hired an employee off TikTok. “We’re all communicating more and more through video and photos, yet so many résumés our hiring team receives feel like 1985.”

    @kallijroberts @tiktokplease accept this as my formal elle woods-style video application to be one of your interns! #fyp #internship #legallyblonde ♬ motive x promiscuous – elfixsounds Kalli Roberts, 23, a student at Brigham Young University in Utah, said the 2001 movie “Legally Blonde” had inspired her TikTok résumé. She recreated the famous application video that the main character, Elle Woods, played by Reese Witherspoon, submitted in a bid to attend Harvard Law School.“Please accept this as my formal Elle Woods style video application,” Ms. Roberts wrote in the caption. Her TikTok went viral, and she is now interning in TikTok’s global business department.“I didn’t feel like my personality or who I actually am was captured in my paper résumé,” Ms. Roberts said. TikTok let her showcase skills, like video editing and public speaking, that might have been line items on a written application, she said, adding, “I had 10 other companies outside of TikTok say, ‘If they don’t want you, we do.’”Many recruiters are looking beyond standardized applications online or through networking sites like LinkedIn, said Sherveen Mashayekhi, co-founder and chief executive of Free Agency, a start-up focused on hiring in the tech industry.“Cover letters aren’t being read and résumés aren’t predictive, so alternative formats are necessary,” he said. “Over the next five to 10 years, it won’t just be video. There will be these other assessments like games for the early stage of the hiring process.”TikTok’s headquarters in Culver City, Calif. The company said it had recruited several employees through videos submitted on the platform.Rozette Rago for The New York TimesSome companies said TikTok résumés were a useful way to evaluate candidates for public-facing roles. Chipotle has posted over 100 open positions to the app so far to hire restaurant team members, said Tressie Lieberman, the chain’s vice president for digital marketing.“We do real cooking in our restaurants,” she said. “We’re excited to see people’s cooking skills, whether it’s putting chicken on the grill, knife skills or people making guacamole at home and bringing those capabilities into the restaurant.”World Wrestling Entertainment is also using TikTok to recruit, said Paul Levesque, the WWE executive vice president for global talent strategy and development, who is better known as the wrestler Triple H. He said video résumés offered a better sense of an applicant’s personality, which is something the company values.“For us, it’s slightly different than a regular office position where you’re looking at someone’s background,” he said. “We’re really looking for charisma.”Shopify, an e-commerce platform, said it had started turning to TikTok to find engineers.“There are smart entrepreneurial technical people everywhere,” said Farhan Thawar, Shopify’s vice president for engineering. “We have this thing where if you can’t explain a technical topic to a 5-year-old, then you probably don’t understand the topic. So having a medium like TikTok is perfect.”Other employers raised questions about relying on virality to determine a candidate’s worthiness. Adore Me, a lingerie company, began experimenting with recruiting through TikTok in January. Chloé Chanudet, Adore Me’s chief marketing officer, said she worried about who got the most distribution in the feed.“Plus size or women of color are much more likely to not have their videos published or be under review for several days,” she said. “We have the same worry that their TikTok résumés may be biased from the algorithm.”TikTok said it “does not moderate content on the basis of shape, size or ability.”

    @coop.cm

    Tiktok do your thing! Check out ➡️ #TikTokResumes #TikTokPartner #productmanagment#jobsearch #graduated
    ♬ original sound – Christian �� Some Gen Z job hunters said they weren’t deterred. Christian Medina, 24, an aspiring product manager who graduated from college last year, said he had gotten six job leads since posting a TikTok video last month seeking a product management role.“Finding a job for a recent grad is almost impossible, and LinkedIn was not the most helpful for me,” he said. “I will definitely continue to use TikTok résumés.” More

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    Building Solar Farms May Not Build the Middle Class

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    To hear Democrats tell it, a green job is supposed to be a good job — and not just good for the planet.The Green New Deal, first introduced in 2019, sought to “create millions of good, high-wage jobs.” And in March, when President Biden unveiled his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, he emphasized the “good-paying” union jobs it would produce while reining in climate change.“My American Jobs Plan will put hundreds of thousands of people to work,” Mr. Biden said, “paying the same exact rate that a union man or woman would get.”But on its current trajectory, the green economy is shaping up to look less like the industrial workplace that lifted workers into the middle class in the 20th century than something more akin to an Amazon warehouse or a fleet of Uber drivers: grueling work schedules, few unions, middling wages and limited benefits.Kellogg Dipzinski has seen this up close, at Assembly Solar, a nearly 2,000-acre solar farm under construction near Flint, Mich.“Hey I see your ads for help,” Mr. Dipzinski, an organizer with the local electrical workers union, texted the site’s project manager in May. “We have manpower. I’ll be out that way Friday.”“Hahahahaha …. yes — help needed on unskilled low wage workers,” was the response. “Competing with our federal government for unemployment is tough.”For workers used to the pay standards of traditional energy industries, such declarations may be jarring. Building an electricity plant powered by fossil fuels usually requires hundreds of electricians, pipe fitters, millwrights and boilermakers who typically earn more than $100,000 a year in wages and benefits when they are unionized.But on solar farms, workers are often nonunion construction laborers who earn an hourly wage in the upper teens with modest benefits — even as the projects are backed by some of the largest investment firms in the world. In the case of Assembly Solar, the backer is D.E. Shaw, with more than $50 billion in assets under management, whose renewable energy arm owns and will operate the plant.While Mr. Biden has proposed higher wage floors for such work, the Senate prospects for this approach are murky. And absent such protections — or even with them — there’s a nagging concern among worker advocates that the shift to green jobs may reinforce inequality rather than alleviate it.“The clean tech industry is incredibly anti-union,” said Jim Harrison, the director of renewable energy for the Utility Workers Union of America. “It’s a lot of transient work, work that is marginal, precarious and very difficult to be able to organize.”The Lessons of 2009Since 2000, the United States has lost about two million private-sector union jobs, which pay above-average wages. To help revive such “high-quality middle-class” employment, as Mr. Biden refers to it, he has proposed federal subsidies to plug abandoned oil and gas wells, build electric vehicles and charging stations and speed the transition to renewable energy.Industry studies, including one cited by the White House, suggest that vastly increasing the number of wind and solar farms could produce over half a million jobs a year over the next decade — primarily in construction and manufacturing.David Popp, an economist at Syracuse University, said those job estimates were roughly in line with his study of the green jobs created by the Recovery Act of 2009, but with two caveats: First, the green jobs created then coincided with a loss of jobs elsewhere, including high-paying, unionized industrial jobs. And the green jobs did not appear to raise the wages of workers who filled them.The effect of Mr. Biden’s plan, which would go further in displacing well-paid workers in fossil-fuel-related industries, could be similarly disappointing.In the energy industry, it takes far more people to operate a coal-powered electricity plant than it takes to operate a wind farm. Many solar farms often make do without a single worker on site.In 2023, a coal- and gas-powered plant called D.E. Karn, about an hour away from the Assembly Solar site in Michigan, is scheduled to shut down. The plant’s 130 maintenance and operations workers, who are represented by the Utility Workers Union of America and whose wages begin around $40 an hour plus benefits, are guaranteed jobs at the same wage within 60 miles. But the union, which has lost nearly 15 percent of the 50,000 members nationally that it had five years ago, says many will have to take less appealing jobs. The utility, Consumers Energy, concedes that it doesn’t have nearly enough renewable energy jobs to absorb all the workers.Joe Duvall, the local union president at the D.E. Karn generating complex in Essexville, Mich. The plant, about an hour away from the Assembly Solar site, is scheduled to go offline in 2023.Erin Schaff/The New York Times“A handful will retire,” said Joe Duvall, the local union president. “The younger ones I think have been searching for what they’d like to do outside of Karn.”While some of the new green construction jobs, such as building new power lines, may pay well, many will pay less than traditional energy industry construction jobs. The construction of a new fossil fuel plant in Michigan employs hundreds of skilled tradespeople who typically make at least $60 an hour in wages and benefits, said Mike Barnwell, the head of the carpenters union in the state.By contrast, about two-thirds of the roughly 250 workers employed on a typical utility-scale solar project are lower-skilled, according to Anthony Prisco, the head of the renewable energy practice for the staffing firm Aerotek. Mr. Prisco said his company pays “around $20” per hour for these positions, depending on the market, and that they are generally nonunion.Mr. Biden has proposed that clean energy projects, which are subsidized by federal tax credits, pay construction workers so-called prevailing wages — a level set by the government in each locality. A few states, most prominently New York, have enacted similar mandates.But it’s not clear that the Senate Democrats will be able to enact a prevailing wage mandate over Republican opposition. And the experience of the Recovery Act, which also required prevailing wages, suggests that such requirements are less effective at raising wages than union representation. Union officials also say that much of the difference in compensation arises from benefits rather than pay.A Different Kind of OwnerUnion officials concede that some tasks, like lifting solar panels onto racks, don’t necessarily require a skilled trades worker. But they say that even these tasks should be directly supervised by tradespeople, and that many others must be performed by tradespeople to ensure safety and quality. “If you hire people off the street at $15 per hour, they’re not skilled and they get injuries,” Mr. Barnwell said. “We would never let a bunch of assemblers work together alone.”One potentially dangerous job is wiring the hundreds or thousands of connections on a typical project — from solar panels to boxes that combine their energy to the inverters and transformers that make the electricity compatible with the rest of the grid.Mr. Barnwell’s union has developed a contract that would employ far more skilled workers than the industry norm so that two-thirds of the workers on a project are tradespeople or apprentices. To be more competitive with nonunion employers, the contract offers tradespeople only $18 an hour in benefits, roughly half the usual amount, and a wage of slightly under $30 an hour. Apprentices earn 60 to 95 percent of that wage plus benefits, depending on experience.So far, there have been relatively few takers. A key reason is that while utilities have traditionally built their own coal- and gas-powered plants, they tend to obtain wind and solar energy from other companies through so-called power purchase agreements. That electricity is then sent to customers through the grid just like electricity from any other source.Once construction is completed, many solar farms often operate without a single worker on-site.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWhen utilities build their own plants, they have little incentive to drive down labor costs because their rate of return is set by regulators — around 10 percent of their initial investment a year, according to securities filings.But when a solar farm is built and owned by another company — typically a green energy upstart, a traditional energy giant or an investment firm like D.E. Shaw, the owner of Assembly Solar in Michigan — that company has every incentive to hold down costs.A lower price helps secure the purchase agreement in the first place. And because the revenue is largely determined by the purchase agreement, a company like D.E. Shaw must keep costs low to have a chance of earning the kind of double-digit returns that a regulated utility earns. Every dollar D.E. Shaw saves on labor is a dollar more for its investors.“For third parties selling power to utilities, they are competing to get the contract,” said Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies utilities. “And the difference between what they’re paid and what their costs are is profit.”Union Labor, ‘Where Possible’In mid-2019, the electrical workers union in Flint elected a trim and tightly coiled man named Greg Remington as its business manager and de facto leader. Around the same time, Mr. Remington ran into an official with Ranger Power, the company developing the project for D.E. Shaw, at a local planning commission meeting.“He was all smiles — ‘Oh, yeah, we look forward to meeting,’” Mr. Remington said of the official. “But he never returned another phone call. I sent emails and he never got back to me.”Development is the stage of a solar project in which a company buys or leases land, secures permits and negotiates a power purchase agreement with a utility. After that, the developer may cede control of the project to a company that will build, own and operate it.But the two companies often work in tandem, as in the case of D.E. Shaw and Ranger Power, which are joint-venture partners “on certain Midwest projects and assets,” according to a Ranger spokeswoman. D.E. Shaw helps fund Ranger Power’s projects, and its involvement provides the resources and credibility to get projects off the ground.Greg Remington, the business manager at the electrical workers local in Flint, Mich. “A lot of this stuff, you’ve got to strike while the iron is hot,” he said of getting a union foothold in green energy construction projects.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesWhen a lawyer for Ranger Power appeared at a Board of Zoning Appeals hearing in Indiana to help advance a Ranger project there in 2019, he emphasized that “the development backing is from D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments,” adding that “they own and operate 31 wind and solar projects across the nation, and they have over $50 billion in investments.” (The firm’s project portfolio is now much larger.)Still, given the sometimes messy maneuvering that goes into obtaining land and permits, it can be helpful for a prominent firm like D.E. Shaw to stand at arm’s length from the development process.In a 2018 letter to a local building trades council in Southern Illinois, known as the Egyptian Building Trades, a Ranger Power official wrote that a solar project the company was developing in the area was “committed to using the appropriate affiliates of the Egyptian Building Trades, where possible, to provide skilled craftsmen and women to perform the construction of the project.” The letter said any entity that acquired the project would be required to honor the commitment.But the project mostly hired nonunion workers to install solar panels. According to a complaint filed by a local union last fall with the Illinois Commerce Commission, the construction contractor has used workers who are not qualified and not supervised by a qualified person “to perform electrical wiring and connections” and paid them less than the union rate.Prairie State Solar, an entity owned by D.E. Shaw that was created to oversee the project, has denied the claims. Prairie State has hired union tradespeople for a portion of the work. Ranger officials likewise played up the construction jobs that the Assembly Solar project would bring to Michigan. But by the time Mr. Remington got involved, the county had approved the project and he had little leverage to ensure that they were union jobs. “A lot of this stuff, you’ve got to strike while the iron is hot,” he said.County officials say that the project is bringing large benefits — including payments to landowners and tax revenue — and that they have no say over organized labor’s involvement. “I don’t think it’s our responsibility in any way to intervene on behalf of or against a union,” said Greg Brodeur, a county commissioner.‘Like a Moving Assembly Line’On an afternoon in mid-May, several laborers coming off their shift at Assembly Solar said they were grateful for the work, which they said paid $16 an hour and provided health insurance and 401(k) contributions. Two said they had moved to the area from Memphis and two from Mississippi, where they had made $9 to $15 an hour — one as a cook, two in construction and one as a mechanic.Jeff Ordower, an organizer with the Green Workers Alliance, a group that pushes for better conditions on such projects, said that out-of-state workers often found jobs through recruiters, some of whom make promises about pay that don’t materialize, and that many workers ended up in the red before starting. “You don’t get money till you get there,” Mr. Ordower said. “You’re borrowing money from friends and family just to get to the gig.”The Assembly Solar workers described their jobs installing panels: Two workers “throw glass,” meaning they lift a panel onto the rack, while a third “catches it,” meaning he or she guides the panel into place. Another group of workers passes by afterward and secures the panels to the rack.One of the men, who identified himself as Travis Shaw, said he typically worked from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. six days a week, including overtime. Another worker, Quendarious Foster, who had been on the job for two weeks, said the workers motivated themselves by trying to beat their daily record, which stood at 30 “trackers,” each holding several dozen panels.“Solar is like a moving assembly line,” said Mr. Prisco, the staffing agency leader. “Instead of the product moving down the line, the people move. It replicates itself over and over again across 1,000, 2,000 acres.”The solar industry is shaping up to look less like a workers’ paradise than something more akin to an Amazon warehouse: grueling work schedules, middling wages and steady profits for wealthy investors.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesMr. Prisco and other experts said meeting a tight deadline was often critical. In some cases, project owners must pay a penalty to the electricity buyer if there are delays.Elsewhere on the site, Mr. Remington pointed out a worker whom he had seen splicing together cables, but she declined to comment when approached by a reporter. Mr. Remington, who visits frequently and has the moxie of a man who, by his own accounting, has been chased around “by some of the finest sheriffs” in Michigan during hunting season, said he had asked the worker the day before if she was a licensed journeyman or if a journeyman was directly supervising her work, as state regulations require. The worker indicated that neither was the case.A spokeswoman for McCarthy Building Companies, the construction contractor for D.E. Shaw Renewable Investments, said that all electrical apprentices were supervised by licensed journeymen at the state-mandated ratio of three-to-one or better and that all splices involved a licensed electrician.During a brief encounter on site with a reporter, Brian Timmer, the project manager who had exchanged a text with a union organizer, said, “That’s the reason I can’t talk to you” when he was asked about union labor. “It gets a lot of people upset.” (Mr. Remington said he was later told by McCarthy that it might use union electricians for a limited assignment — repairing some defective components.)The county electrical inspector, Dane Deisler, said that McCarthy had produced licenses when he had asked to see them, but that he hadn’t “physically gone through and counted” the licenses and didn’t know how many licensed electricians were on site.Mr. Remington is convinced there are far fewer than a project of this scale requires. “That’s a high-voltage splice box right there,” he said while driving around the perimeter, alluding to potential dangers. He pointed to another box and said, “Tell me if you don’t think that’s electrical work.”Later, explaining why he invested so much effort in a job site where few of his members are likely to be employed, Mr. Remington reflected on the future. “Well, this is going to be the only show in town,” he said. “I want us to have a piece of it.” More

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    Federal Reserve Chair to Testify Before Congress

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    When Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, appears before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday, he will be testifying at a fraught moment both politically and economically, given the recent rise in inflation.The Consumer Price Index jumped 5.4 percent in June from a year earlier, the biggest increase since 2008 and a larger move than economists had expected. Price pressures appear poised to last longer than policymakers at the White House or Fed anticipated.In testimony on Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee, Mr. Powell attributed rapid price gains to factors tied to the economy’s reopening from the pandemic, and indicated in response to questioning that Fed officials expected inflation to begin calming in six months or so.He acknowledged that “the incoming inflation data have been higher than expected and hoped for,” but he said the gains were coming from a “small group” of goods and services directly tied to reopening.For now, he voiced comfort with the central bank’s relatively patient policy path even in light of the hotter-than-expected price data. He said that the labor market was improving but that “there is still a long way to go.”He also said the Fed’s goal of achieving “substantial further progress” toward its economic goals before taking the first steps toward a more normal policy setting “is still a ways off.” More

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    A Great Inflation Redux? Economists Point to Big Differences.

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    Prices climbed for years before the runaway inflation of the 1970s. Economists see parallels today, but the differences are just as important.The last time big government spending, supply chain shocks and rising wages threatened to keep inflation meaningfully higher, President Biden’s top economic adviser was in diapers.Jump forward half a century, and some aspects of 2021 look a little bit like a do-over of the late 1960s and the 1970s, which many economists think laid the groundwork for the breakaway inflation that took hold and lasted into the 1980s. At a time when prices have popped and debate rages over how quickly they will moderate, those comparisons have become a hot topic.Yet many inflation experts point out critical differences between this era and that one, from the decline of unionization to the ascent of globalization and shifting demographics, and say those discrepancies are part of the reason faster inflation is likely to be short-lived this time around. White House officials — including Brian Deese, Mr. Biden’s top economic adviser, who is 43 — say they expect price pressures to calm.“We’re looking at the implications of an economy that comes out of a policy-induced coma and comes roaring back,” Mr. Deese said at a recent event, explaining why prices have moved up.Inflation concerns may already be easing among investors. Yields on government debt rose earlier this year as investors demanded higher interest rates to compensate for the risk of higher inflation, among other factors. But yields have since fallen amid signs that the economic recovery is proceeding more slowly than initially expected.The main certainty that emerges from the debate is this: Like half a century ago, the American economy is being rocked by big and unusual changes that have hit all at once. But those trends make it hard for analysts to guess what will happen, since their tools use the past to predict the future — and there’s no historical precedent for reopening from a global pandemic. This won’t be 1969 or 1978 again, but what it will look like is difficult to foresee.“History doesn’t repeat itself,” said Rebecca L. Spang, a historian at Indiana University who has studied money and inflation. “Recognizing the complexity of any particular moment is something that economics, with its ahistorical models, is not very good at.”Monetary policy: Fine tuning, take two?The Federal Reserve entered the 1960s with the same two-part job that it has now: fostering stable inflation and maximum employment by keeping the economy growing at an even keel using its monetary policies, which influence how expensive it is to borrow money.Back then, the Fed was very focused on the employment part of its goal. The Employment Act of 1946 had instructed the government to dedicate itself to creating a strong job market. Years of weak price gains made runaway inflation seem like a distant risk, and a growing number of economists had come to believe that higher employment levels could be “bought” with slightly more inflation.Even when the then-Fed chair, William McChesney Martin, grew worried about price pressures in the mid-1960s, the institution was slow to move, because some of his colleagues hoped to drive unemployment down to 4 percent. When it did raise rates, it did so slowly — a situation that was exacerbated in the 1970s, when Mr. Martin’s successor, Arthur Burns, came under intense political pressure from the Nixon White House to keep easy-money policies in place.By the time the Fed began to fight inflation in earnest, it was too late. Some economists draw parallels between that era and now. The Fed last year renewed its focus on the labor market, calling full employment a “broad-based and inclusive” goal. And after years of tepid price gains, officials have signaled that they would be willing to accept periods of higher prices.Yet unlike in the 1960s, the Fed now has a clear framework for dealing with inflation. It no longer has a specific numeric goal for full employment — it looks for signs like faster wage growth. It has given no signal that it would again tolerate years and years of higher prices. “The Fed is very focused on keeping inflation relatively settled,” said Alan Detmeister, a former central bank economist who is now at the bank U.B.S. Plus, the White House now stresses the Fed’s separation from politics, and the Fed itself often talks about that “precious” independence.An Inflationary HistoryConsumer prices are rising quickly, but inflation is far from levels in the 1970s.

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    Annual percent change in Consumer Price Index
    Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesFiscal policy: Expansive then and now.The current moment resembles the period that laid the groundwork for America’s Great Inflation in another way: a rapid increase in deficit-funded government spending.Back then, the culprit was the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson began ramping up U.S. troop levels in the mid-1960s, and with public opposition to the war rising, he was reluctant to pay for it by raising taxes or cutting spending elsewhere in the budget. The result was what amounted to a jolt of fiscal stimulus at a time when the U.S. economy was already strong — a classic recipe for inflation.Today, the economy is growing quickly, and many companies have complained of difficulties in finding enough workers, suggesting that the United States might be closer to full employment than standard measures propose.“We’re not beyond full employment at this point, but a number of people are predicting that we will be, and there’s very little question that we are experiencing a big surge in demand,” said Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist and former Fed vice chairman.But there are obvious differences between the two periods. The 1960s saw historically low unemployment while the current economy is still missing millions of jobs. According to many standard measures, the recovery remains fragile enough that government spending should lead to faster job growth, not more inflation. Plus, fiscal stimulus will likely slow with time as pandemic-era programs such as enhanced unemployment benefits end. Supply shocks: Then it was oil, now it’s computer chips.In the 1960s, an overheating economy gradually pushed up prices, but it was in the 1970s when inflation really took off. Inflation jumped to 12 percent in late 1974, then moderated, and hit a peak of more than 14 percent in early 1980.The cumulative effects of that much inflation were eye-popping. In January 1970, $100 would have been able to buy as many goods and services as $280 could buy in January 1985. By comparison, $100 of purchases in 2005 would only have cost $135 by 2020.The immediate culprit, in both big 1970s spikes, was oil. The Arab oil embargo of 1973-74 and the Iranian revolution of 1979 both contributed to an oil slump, leading to price spikes and gas shortages, which in turn pushed up prices elsewhere in the economy. Shortages in commodities including lumber and agricultural goods also contributed.Oil prices are also rising now, jumping higher this week after talks between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies failed to reach a deal to ramp up production — but the situation is not as dire as the disruptions half a century ago. The economy is also facing snarls as it reopens and a dearth of computer chips is pushing up prices for video game systems and used cars. The Biden administration, much like the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, has been examining what it can do to ease the bottlenecks, including creating a task force to look into disruptions affecting construction, transportation, semiconductor production and agriculture.“It gave me a feeling of déjà vu, because that’s what we were doing in the ’70s — we were trying to get supply-side effects,” said Barry P. Bosworth, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who led the Council on Wage and Price Stability under President Jimmy Carter. The efforts failed to control overall inflation, he said.“It doesn’t work,” he said. “As a macro policy, you can’t go around trying to put your finger in the dike everywhere it pops up.”Wages: The trouble with spirals.The big price spikes in the 1960s and 1970s reversed once the underlying conditions that created them eased. But not all the way — in each case, the rate of inflation bottomed out a bit higher than the time before. Many economists believe that pattern had to do with human psychology: Workers and businesses had come to expect a higher rate of inflation, and had adapted their behavior accordingly, creating a self-sustaining cycle.Economists particularly highlight the role of wages. Businesses can cut prices just as easily as they can raise them, but cutting wages is harder. No worker wants to be told that a job that was worth $10 an hour yesterday is worth just $9.50 an hour today. And if workers expect prices to rise at 5 percent per year, they will want raises to keep up with inflation.Most economists believe that the forces driving the current surge in inflation will ease in the months ahead. The question is whether that will happen before expectations shift. Some surveys have found that consumers are already beginning to anticipate faster inflation to stick around, although that evidence is mixed. Wages, too, have continued rising as employers struggle to rehire workers, although it’s not yet clear that they are taking off.One reason that temporary price increases turned into permanent wage increases in the middle of the 20th century is that many union contracts had escalator clauses that tied wage gains directly to inflation. Those provisions effectively helped lock in price increases, feeding into the price spiral, said David Card, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the role of union contracts in inflation. Far fewer workers are members of unions today, and few contracts have inflation clauses, in part because they haven’t been necessary in a period of low inflation.Perhaps the largest difference of all? Time. In the 1960s, it took years of price spikes and policy failures for Americans to lose confidence that their leaders could keep inflation under control. “What happened by the ’70s took almost 10 years to develop,” Mr. Card said. “I don’t think it’s that feasible that it could happen that quickly.” More

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    A Planned Biden Order Aims to Tilt the Job Market Toward Workers

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    Noncompete clauses, licensing requirements and corporate mergers have tended to strengthen the hand of business.Hair salon employees can have onerous licensing requirements that vary from state to state. Some barbers have also encountered noncompete agreements.Annie Tritt for The New York TimesAccording to an increasingly influential school of thought in left-of-center economic circles, corporate mergers and some other common business practices have made American workers worse off. The government, this theory holds, should address it.It appears that school has a particularly powerful student: President Biden.This week, the White House is planning to release an executive order focused on competition policy. People familiar with the order say one section has several provisions aimed at increasing competition in the labor market.The order will encourage the Federal Trade Commission to ban or limit noncompete agreements, which employers have increasingly used in recent years to try to hamper workers’ ability to quit for a better job. It encourages the F.T.C. to ban “unnecessary” occupational licensing restrictions, which can make finding new work harder, especially across state lines. And it encourages the F.T.C. and Justice Department to further restrict the ability of employers to share information on worker pay in ways that might amount to collusion.More broadly, the executive order encourages antitrust regulators to consider how mergers might contribute to so-called monopsony — conditions in which workers have few choices of where to work and therefore lack leverage to negotiate higher wages or better benefits.The order will depend on the ability of regulators to carry out the rules the White House seeks and to write them in ways that survive legal challenges. And many of the policies that labor economists see as problematic, including licensing requirements, are set at the state level, leaving a limited federal role.Still, the planned order is the most concerted effort in recent times to use the power of the federal government to tilt the playing field toward workers. It builds on years of research that has made its way from the intellectual fringes to the mainstream.“It’s increasingly appreciated that lack of competition has held down wages and that there’s a lot of scope for government to improve that,” said Jason Furman, who was chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration’s second term. “I don’t think addressing competition issues will miraculously transform inequality in this country, but it will help. The government should be on your side when it comes to wages.”The council published research on these themes toward the end of the Obama presidency, but concrete policy steps were more limited than those the Biden administration is planning to seek. As vice president, Mr. Furman recalled, Mr. Biden was particularly energized by issues around wage collusion and noncompete agreements.Even with backing from the White House, a meaningful gap remains between what academics who study the labor market are finding and the laws governing the relationship between companies and their workers.Ioana Marinescu, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzed data on 8,000 specific labor markets with two co-authors and found that when a job market was heavily concentrated among a few employers, it resulted in a 5 percent to 17 percent decline in wages.But she said regulators tend to be wary of trying to block a merger on the grounds of its potential labor market impact because of a lack of legal precedent.“Legally we’re on firm ground, but it may or may not be seen that way by some particular judge who has this on their desk,” Professor Marinescu said. “That creates a risk for the agency that doesn’t like the idea they might lose a case.”She said that having pressure from the White House to pursue those legal theories would help, but that congressional legislation explicitly charging antitrust regulators with focusing on labor market conditions would help more.There has been some bipartisan discussion on Capitol Hill about reining in noncompete agreements, particularly after the emergence of some outrage-stoking stories. (Sandwich shops and hair salons contractually barred workers from going to a competitor, for example.) These disputes tend to pit incumbent businesses — who don’t want their workers to be able to quit with potentially valuable information — against start-ups who want more ability to hire people at will.Occupational licensing is also an area with potential for bipartisan agreement, uniting those who want more widespread labor market opportunity with those opposed to excessive regulation. Many more jobs require occupational licenses than in decades past, and typically a license in one state is not easily transferable to another, potentially limiting workers’ ability to move to places where they can earn more. This is particularly problematic for military families, who typically have no choice but to move regularly.Still, there are potential negative effects with the Biden approach. By creating a barrier to entry for workers entering a field, licensing may also keep wages higher for existing workers in those jobs, meaning some people may stand to lose if requirements are revoked. Moreover, research by Peter Q. Blair of Harvard and Bobby Chung of the University of Illinois suggests that women and racial minorities experience less of a pay gap in fields that involve occupational licenses.Put it all together, and the Biden administration’s push for a more competitive, less corporation-friendly labor market is decidedly not a set of magic-bullet policies that will suddenly give workers more market power overnight.Rather, it’s part of a set of policies — other aspects of the president’s agenda very much among them — that over time would nudge the balance of power away from the prevailing order of most of the last 40 years. More

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    How Times Reporters Investigated Amazon Employment Practices

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    A recent Times project that examined how the tech giant manages its workers took months of reporting and hundreds of interviews.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Last summer, amid a hiring spree at Amazon so gigantic it left historians struggling for comparisons, Karen Weise, a Times reporter who covers the company from Seattle, brought up a puzzling question to her editors. Approaching the million-worker mark, Amazon was on track to becoming the largest private employer in the United States. Yet, in spite of solid wages and generous benefits, it was quickly cycling through employees. Why?Executives had an “almost palpable fear of running out of workers,” she said later.In August, she got a call from Jodi Kantor, a Times reporter in Brooklyn who was talking to workers from a variety of industries who were struggling with strict rules about time and attendance during the pandemic. She wanted to look more closely at “time off task,” or T.O.T., Amazon’s practice of monitoring workers by the second and disciplining them for too many unexcused pauses.One hot day in a New York City park, Ms. Kantor met with Dayana Santos, an employee who had been repeatedly praised by her bosses but fired for too much T.O.T. during one bad day filled with mishaps she said were beyond her control. Ms. Santos’s story raised fairness questions, and a business one: Why would Amazon, voracious for workers, fire a good employee?Those questions led to a recent Times investigative report on the company that revealed systemic problems in its model for managing workers, such as unbridled turnover, minimal human contact, an error-plagued leave system, delayed benefits and mistaken firings.Ms. Santos had worked at JFK8 on Staten Island, a compelling setting for a potential investigation: the only Amazon fulfillment center in the nation’s largest city, operating under maximum pandemic pressure to deliver to homebound customers. Other media outlets had examined working conditions, injury rates and numerous other aspects of Amazon warehouses. The Times reporters, focusing on JFK8, had a different goal: to understand the connection between the company’s employment model and its astonishing success. They set out to chronicle Amazon’s core relationship with its humongous, growing work force — who got hired and fired, and the rules, systems and assumptions that governed everything in between.But JFK8 was vast — about 5,000 employees in a space the size of 15 football fields — and managers and human resources workers were reluctant to talk. Ms. Weise contacted corporate employees, many of whom never responded. To help tackle the huge project, Grace Ashford, a researcher on the Investigations desk, joined the team. Together she and Ms. Kantor spent many hours on the phone and at the bus stop outside JFK8, including on Prime Day, asking workers about their experiences.Often, Ms. Kantor and Ms. Ashford found that new hires were grateful for the pay but left after a few weeks. “Amazon was a lifeline for them, until it wasn’t,” Ms. Ashford said.Knowing that their requests to interview Amazon’s most senior executives were long shots, the reporters had to find creative ways of understanding the culture inside JFK8. They spoke with human resources staff and corporate leaders, who described Amazon’s glitchy, strained systems and the business challenge of maintaining staff during a public health emergency.Ms. Weise took masked walks with Paul Stroup, a data scientist who had tried to steer Amazon through the crisis but left thinking Amazon could do better by its workers. Ms. Kantor spent the fall shadowing Ann Castillo, who was struggling with Amazon’s treatment of her severely ill husband, a JFK8 veteran.Back office employees at a different location, in Costa Rica, described the partial collapse of the company’s leave systems early in the pandemic, leading to problems like halted benefits for Mr. Castillo.Data obtained through public records showed that Amazon’s overall work force was largely Black and Latino, but internal documents revealed that Black workers at JFK8 were disproportionately fired.After Ms. Santos, the worker fired for T.O.T., applied for unemployment, Amazon contested her benefits. In an obscure New York administrative court, the company filed internal policy memos that provided a rare inside glimpse of the T.O.T. system.After almost 200 interviews, a picture emerged of a company that “seemed far more precise with packages than people,” Ms. Kantor said. Amazon had tried to grow its business quickly by creating a giant semi-automated machine for hiring and managing — but that system often stumbled.Ms. Weise was able to confirm that while the company boasted of job creation, turnover at the warehouses was roughly 150 percent a year — a figure never reported before — meaning Amazon had to replace the equivalent of its entire warehouse work force every eight months.That number, and the entire project, took on deeper meaning when David Niekerk, the architect of Amazon’s warehouse human resources system, told her the turnover was more or less by design. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, had sought to avoid an entrenched work force, fearing laziness and a “march to mediocrity.” So upward mobility and raises for warehouse workers were limited.As Ms. Kantor wrote and Ms. Ashford continued to report, Ms. Weise led a delicate, six-week effort to confirm the voluminous information in the story with Amazon and garner its responses. By then, the company had provided some input, including a tour of JFK8 by the general manager and an interview with Ofori Agboka, head of human resources for the warehouses, who defended Amazon but acknowledged that the company had leaned too heavily on technology and self-service.As part of the fact-checking process, the reporters repeatedly asked Amazon about the T.O.T. policy and Ms. Santos’s firing. Shortly before the article was published, Amazon announced an immediate policy change: No longer could someone be fired for one bad day. Ms. Santos and others were eligible for rehire.The article elicited a strong public reaction, tips from other employees who want to tell their stories and an outpouring of reader comments. (“It was not Bezos who made Amazon. It was all of us who bought from it,” one said.) On July 1, Amazon announced an addition to its leadership principles — critical guidelines for internal decisions and management — that focused on being a better employer.In coming months, the focus is likely to be on whether Amazon will change some of the practices that have propelled it to dominance, either because of internal action or outside force.“They say that broadly, their work force is happy, and their internal surveys say that more than 90 percent would recommend working at Amazon to a friend,” Ms. Weise said.“But 150 percent turnover in a year means that something isn’t working for many people.” More

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    Pandemic Wave of Automation May Be Bad News for Workers

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    The need for social distancing led restaurants and grocery stores to seek technological help. That may improve productivity, but could also cost jobs.When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse.Gamers at Dave & Buster’s in Dallas who want pretzel dogs can order and pay from their phones — no need to flag down a waiter.And in the drive-through lane at Checkers near Atlanta, requests for Big Buford burgers and Mother Cruncher chicken sandwiches may be fielded not by a cashier in a headset, but by a voice-recognition algorithm.An increase in automation, especially in service industries, may prove to be an economic legacy of the pandemic. Businesses from factories to fast-food outlets to hotels turned to technology last year to keep operations running amid social distancing requirements and contagion fears. Now the outbreak is ebbing in the United States, but the difficulty in hiring workers — at least at the wages that employers are used to paying — is providing new momentum for automation.Technological investments that were made in response to the crisis may contribute to a post-pandemic productivity boom, allowing for higher wages and faster growth. But some economists say the latest wave of automation could eliminate jobs and erode bargaining power, particularly for the lowest-paid workers, in a lasting way.“Once a job is automated, it’s pretty hard to turn back,” said Casey Warman, an economist at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who has studied automation in the pandemic.The trend toward automation predates the pandemic, but it has accelerated at what is proving to be a critical moment. The rapid reopening of the economy has led to a surge in demand for waiters, hotel maids, retail sales clerks and other workers in service industries that had cut their staffs. At the same time, government benefits have allowed many people to be selective in the jobs they take. Together, those forces have given low-wage workers a rare moment of leverage, leading to higher pay, more generous benefits and other perks.Automation threatens to tip the advantage back toward employers, potentially eroding those gains. A working paper published by the International Monetary Fund this year predicted that pandemic-induced automation would increase inequality in coming years, not just in the United States but around the world.“Six months ago, all these workers were essential,” said Marc Perrone, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers, a union representing grocery workers. “Everyone was calling them heroes. Now, they’re trying to figure out how to get rid of them.”Checkers, like many fast-food restaurants, experienced a jump in sales when the pandemic shut down most in-person dining. But finding workers to meet that demand proved difficult — so much so that Shana Gonzales, a Checkers franchisee in the Atlanta area, found herself back behind the cash register three decades after she started working part time at Taco Bell while in high school.“We really felt like there has to be another solution,” she said.So Ms. Gonzales contacted Valyant AI, a Colorado-based start-up that makes voice recognition systems for restaurants. In December, after weeks of setup and testing, Valyant’s technology began taking orders at one of Ms. Gonzales’s drive-through lanes. Now customers are greeted by an automated voice designed to understand their orders — including modifications and special requests — suggest add-ons like fries or a shake, and feed the information directly to the kitchen and the cashier.The rollout has been successful enough that Ms. Gonzales is getting ready to expand the system to her three other restaurants.“We’ll look back and say why didn’t we do this sooner,” she said.Shana Gonzales, who owns four Checkers franchises in the Atlanta area, said she has had difficulty finding workers to meet demand.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesThe push toward automation goes far beyond the restaurant sector. Hotels, retailers, manufacturers and other businesses have all accelerated technological investments. In a survey of nearly 300 global companies by the World Economic Forum last year, 43 percent of businesses said they expected to reduce their work forces through new uses of technology.Some economists see the increased investment as encouraging. For much of the past two decades, the U.S. economy has struggled with weak productivity growth, leaving workers and stockholders to compete over their share of the income — a game that workers tended to lose. Automation may harm specific workers, but if it makes the economy more productive, that could be good for workers as a whole, said Katy George, a senior partner at McKinsey, the consulting firm.She cited the example of a client in manufacturing who had been pushing his company for years to embrace augmented-reality technology in its factories. The pandemic finally helped him win the battle: With air travel off limits, the technology was the only way to bring in an expert to help troubleshoot issues at a remote plant.“For the first time, we’re seeing that these technologies are both increasing productivity, lowering cost, but they’re also increasing flexibility,” she said. “We’re starting to see real momentum building, which is great news for the world, frankly.”Other economists are less sanguine. Daron Acemoglu of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that many of the technological investments had just replaced human labor without adding much to overall productivity.In a recent working paper, Professor Acemoglu and a colleague concluded that “a significant portion of the rise in U.S. wage inequality over the last four decades has been driven by automation” — and he said that trend had almost certainly accelerated in the pandemic.“If we automated less, we would not actually have generated that much less output but we would have had a very different trajectory for inequality,” Professor Acemoglu said.Ms. Gonzales, the Checkers franchisee, isn’t looking to cut jobs. She said she would hire 30 people if she could find them. And she has raised hourly pay to about $10 for entry-level workers, from about $9 before the pandemic. Technology, she said, is easing pressure on workers and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed.“Our approach is, this is an assistant for you,” she said. “This allows our employee to really focus” on customers.Ms. Gonzales acknowledged she could fully staff her restaurants if she offered $14 to $15 an hour to attract workers. But doing so, she said, would force her to raise prices so much that she would lose sales — and automation allows her to take another course.The artificial intelligence system that feeds information to the kitchen at a Checkers.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesTechnology is easing pressure on workers and speeding up service when restaurants are chronically understaffed, Ms. Gonzales said.Lynsey Weatherspoon for The New York TimesRob Carpenter, Valyant’s chief executive, noted that at most restaurants, taking drive-through orders is only part of an employee’s responsibilities. Automating that task doesn’t eliminate a job; it makes the job more manageable.“We’re not talking about automating an entire position,” he said. “It’s just one task within the restaurant, and it’s gnarly, one of the least desirable tasks.”But technology doesn’t have to take over all aspects of a job to leave workers worse off. If automation allows a restaurant that used to require 10 employees a shift to operate with eight or nine, that will mean fewer jobs in the long run. And even in the short term, the technology could erode workers’ bargaining power.“Often you displace enough of the tasks in an occupation and suddenly that occupation is no more,” Professor Acemoglu said. “It might kick me out of a job, or if I keep my job I’ll get lower wages.”At some businesses, automation is already affecting the number and type of jobs available. Meltwich, a restaurant chain that started in Canada and is expanding into the United States, has embraced a range of technologies to cut back on labor costs. Its grills no longer require someone to flip burgers — they grill both sides at once, and need little more than the press of a button.“You can pull a less-skilled worker in and have them adapt to our system much easier,” said Ryan Hillis, a Meltwich vice president. “It certainly widens the scope of who you can have behind that grill.”With more advanced kitchen equipment, software that allows online orders to flow directly to the restaurant and other technological advances, Meltwich needs only two to three workers on a shift, rather than three or four, Mr. Hillis said.Such changes, multiplied across thousands of businesses in dozens of industries, could significantly change workers’ prospects. Professor Warman, the Canadian economist, said technologies developed for one purpose tend to spread to similar tasks, which could make it hard for workers harmed by automation to shift to another occupation or industry.“If a whole sector of labor is hit, then where do those workers go?” Professor Warman said. Women, and to a lesser degree people of color, are likely to be disproportionately affected, he added.The grocery business has long been a source of steady, often unionized jobs for people without a college degree. But technology is changing the sector. Self-checkout lanes have reduced the number of cashiers; many stores have simple robots to patrol aisles for spills and check inventory; and warehouses have become increasingly automated. Kroger in April opened a 375,000-square-foot warehouse with more than 1,000 robots that bag groceries for delivery customers. The company is even experimenting with delivering groceries by drone.Other companies in the industry are doing the same. Jennifer Brogan, a spokeswoman for Stop & Shop, a grocery chain based in New England, said that technology allowed the company to better serve customers — and that it was a competitive necessity.“Competitors and other players in the retail space are developing technologies and partnerships to reduce their costs and offer improved service and value for customers,” she said. “Stop & Shop needs to do the same.”In 2011, Patrice Thomas took a part-time job in the deli at a Stop & Shop in Norwich, Conn. A decade later, he manages the store’s prepared foods department, earning around $40,000 a year.Mr. Thomas, 32, said that he wasn’t concerned about being replaced by a robot anytime soon, and that he welcomed technologies making him more productive — like more powerful ovens for rotisserie chickens and blast chillers that quickly cool items that must be stored cold.But he worries about other technologies — like automated meat slicers — that seem to enable grocers to rely on less experienced, lower-paid workers and make it harder to build a career in the industry.“The business model we seem to be following is we’re pushing toward automation and we’re not investing equally in the worker,” he said. “Today it’s, ‘We want to get these robots in here to replace you because we feel like you’re overpaid and we can get this kid in there and all he has to do is push this button.’” More

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    June Jobs Report Delivers Good News and Big Questions for Washington

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    Payrolls surged and wages climbed, both positives for President Biden and the Federal Reserve. But stagnant labor market participation highlights a key risk.Employers are hiring and wages are rising but the number of people actively working or looking for jobs remains stagnant, a phenomenon that is making it difficult for the Federal Reserve and White House to determine how much the labor market has recovered and how long the U.S. economy will continue to need hefty support.Employers added 850,000 workers to payrolls in June, a strong number that was buttressed by rising wages as employers scramble to hire to meet surging customer demand. The report gives the Biden administration encouraging talking points, and the Fed a sign that the economy is making progress toward the central bank’s full employment goal.But the fact that workers aren’t rushing back to the job market injects a note of caution into an otherwise sunny outlook. The labor force participation rate, a measure of people working or looking for jobs, has barely budged in recent months and was unchanged at 61.6 percent in June. It remains sharply down from 63.3 percent before the crisis started.The labor force participation rate did not budge.Share of the working-age population who are in the labor force (employed, unemployed but looking for work or on temporary layoff) More