Layoffs and Job Reductions

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    Jobless for a Year? Employment Gaps Might Be Less of a Problem Now.

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    People who were out of work for a while have typically found it much harder to get a job. The pandemic may have changed how employers view people who have been unemployed for months or years.Jamie Baxter used to be skeptical of job applicants who had not worked for long stretches of time, assuming that other employers had passed them over.“My mind would jump to the negative stigma of ‘Wow, why could this person not get a job for this long?’” said Mr. Baxter, who is chief executive of Qwick, a temporary staffing company for the hospitality industry.Yet recently, he has hired at least half a dozen people who had been out of work for several months or longer. The pandemic, he said, “made me open my eyes.”Mr. Baxter’s change of heart reflects an apparent willingness among employers in the pandemic era to hire applicants who have been jobless for long periods. That’s a break from the last recession, when long-term unemployment became self-perpetuating for millions of Americans. People who had gone without a job for months or years found it very difficult to find a new one, in part because employers avoided them.The importance of what are often referred to as “résumé gaps” is fading, experts say, because of labor shortages and more bosses seeming to realize that long absences from the job market shouldn’t taint candidates. This is good news for the 2.2 million people who have been out of work for more than six months, and are considered long-term unemployed, according to the Labor Department, double the number before the pandemic.But that change may not last if more people decide to return to the job market or if the economy cools because of another wave of coronavirus cases, experts say.Mr. Baxter, whose company is based in Phoenix, said he has learned from his own experience. Forced to lay off roughly 70 percent of his 54 employees when the pandemic hit, he realized he was responsible for creating the very employment gaps he had once used to screen out job applicants.“I knew I was creating employment gaps,” he said. “Maybe other people would have employment gaps for very justifiable reasons. It doesn’t mean that they are not a good employee.”Even in normal times, the long-term unemployed face steep odds. The longer applicants are out of work, the more they may become discouraged and the less time they may spend searching for jobs. Their skills may deteriorate or their professional networks may erode.Some employers regard applicants with long periods of unemployment unfavorably, research shows — even if many are reluctant to admit it.“Employers don’t often articulate why but the idea, they believe, is that people who are out of work are damaged in some way, which is why they are out of work” said Peter Cappelli, the director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.Some economists believe the pandemic’s unique effects on the economy may have changed things. Notably, the pandemic destroyed millions of jobs seemingly all at once, especially in the travel, leisure and hospitality industries. Many people could not, or chose not to, work because of health concerns or family responsibilities.“For people who were just laid off because of Covid, will there be a stigma? I don’t really think so,” Mr. Cappelli said. Although monthly job-finding rates plummeted for both the short- and long-term unemployed during the early part of the pandemic, the rate for the long-term jobless has since rebounded to roughly the same level as before the pandemic, according to government data. While that does not imply the employment-gap stigma has disappeared, it suggests it is no worse than it has been.That was what Rachel Love, 35, found when she applied for a job at Qwick.After Ms. Love was furloughed, and then laid off from her sales job at a hotel in Dallas last year, she kept hoping that her former company would hire her back. She had been unemployed for about a year when she came to terms with the idea of getting a new job and became aware of a business development position at Qwick.Interviewers did not press her about why she had been out of work for so long. “I hope now, just with everything going on, I think people can look at the résumé and look at the time frame and maybe just infer,” said Ms. Love, who began working remotely for Qwick in June.The tight labor market is almost certainly a factor. In October, there were 11 million job openings for 7.4 million unemployed workers.“The fact of the matter is, there are far more jobs in the U.S. than there are people to fill them right now,” said Jeramy Kaiman, who leads professional recruitment for the western United States at the Adecco Group, a staffing agency, working primarily with accounting, finance and legal businesses. As a result, he added, employers have had to become more willing to consider applicants who had been out of work for a while.Even when the worker shortage eases, labor experts express optimism that employers will care less about employment gaps than before, partly because the pandemic has made hiring managers more sympathetic.Zoë Harte, the chief people officer at Upwork, a company that matches freelancers with jobs, said there had been a “societal shift” in how companies understand employment gaps.“It’s become more and more evident that opportunity isn’t equally distributed, and so it’s important for us as people who are creating jobs and interviewing people to really look at ‘What can this person contribute?’ as opposed to ‘What does this piece of paper say they have done in the past?’” she said.That aligns with Burton Amos’s experience. After he was laid off from his job as a program support specialist with a federal contractor at the start of the pandemic, Mr. Amos, 60, started an online wireless accessories business and began studying for a career in information technology but was unable to land other work.On his résumé and LinkedIn profile, he was open about his lack of full-time employment, an approach that seemed to appeal to interviewers.“Every job did ask about ‘What am I doing right now?’” he said. “They didn’t specifically say anything specific about the pandemic.” He recently received multiple job offers and has accepted a position as a public aid eligibility assistant with the State of Illinois.Many companies have also redoubled their efforts on diversity and are more willing to employ people with a range of backgrounds and experiences, including applicants with long employment gaps.Scott Bonneau, vice president of global talent attraction at the hiring site Indeed, said employment gaps are “not a part of our consideration.” His company instead tries to evaluate a candidate’s skills and capabilities. That practice began before the pandemic, as part of the company’s diversity and inclusion efforts, and it is a shift that he said he expected to see at other businesses.“I think there is the beginnings of a movement to stop focusing on employment gaps entirely at least in certain parts of the employment world,” said Mr. Bonneau, whose responsibilities include hiring people for jobs at Indeed.But other labor experts worry that the employment-gap stigma will return once the economy stabilizes.Employers may not be as forgiving of gaps on résumés that stretch into next year now that jobs, and vaccines, are more available, said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley. The stigma may be more evident for lower-wage workers in industries where current job openings are especially high.“I would expect that to whatever extent that it exists, it will come back,” Mr. Rothstein said.History also suggests that the empathy that hiring managers may feel now will not last, said Maria Heidkamp, the director of program development at the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.In a study released in 2013 by the Heldrich Center, a quarter of American workers said they were directly affected through a job loss and nearly 80 percent said they knew at least someone who had lost a job in the previous four years. Those levels would seem to make hiring managers more understanding of those who had lost their jobs because the experience was so common, Ms. Heidkamp said. “But that’s not what we saw,” she said.“The equation may play out differently” now, she added. “That said, I’m still worried.”Ben Casselman More

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    Why New York City’s Jobless Rate Is Double the Rest of the Country's

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    The city has regained fewer than 6 of every 10 jobs it lost since the pandemic began, while the nation as a whole has regained more than 90 percent of lost jobs.Since the start of the year, nearly six million jobs have been added in the United States. The unemployment rate has plummeted to 4.2 percent, close to where it stood before the pandemic. But in New York City, the economy appears to be in a rut.After gaining 350,000 jobs in the last months of 2020, employment has slowed considerably this year, with just 187,000 jobs added since March. The city’s unemployment rate of 9.4 percent is more than double the national average, and its decline in recent months was largely caused by people dropping out of the labor force.From the start of the pandemic, no other large American city has been hit as hard as New York, or has struggled as much to replenish its labor force. Nearly a million people lost their jobs in the early months of the pandemic, and thousands of businesses closed.As the city plunged into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the unemployment rate skyrocketed, peaking in June 2020 at 20 percent. Nearly every industry — from construction to finance to social services — has fewer people employed now than before the pandemic swept into New York in March 2020.Nearly two years later, New York has added back a little more than half the jobs it lost, according to the state Labor Department, far less than the rest of the country, underscoring how the pandemic ravaged some of the city’s core economic engines like tourism, hospitality and retail.The protracted pandemic has shut out tourists and scared off the crush of suburbanites who filled office towers every weekday — a “double whammy,” said Andrew Rein, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonprofit watchdog group. Just 8 percent of office workers were back at work five days a week in early November, according to a survey by the Partnership for New York City, a business group.Crowds are thinner at Pennsylvania Station in Midtown Manhattan with so many suburban office employees still working remotely.Yuvraj Khanna for The New York Times“Commuters and tourists consume a lot of the same stuff,” Mr. Rein said. “They consume, in a certain sense, the vibrancy of New York City.”Their absence has contributed to the loss of more than 100,000 jobs in the city’s restaurants, bars and hotels, plus nearly 60,000 additional jobs in retailing, performing arts, entertainment and recreation. The reopening of Broadway theaters and the high rate of vaccinations has provided a boost this fall that lowered the city’s official unemployment rate to 9.4 percent in October.But the rise of the Omicron variant could threaten the fledgling recovery just as the next mayor, Eric Adams, takes office in January. Mr. Adams has pledged to use the full resources of city government to reinvigorate the economy, creating a citywide jobs training and placement program.So far, the city has regained fewer than six of every 10 jobs it lost since the pandemic began in early 2020, while the nation as a whole has regained more than nine out of 10 lost jobs, said James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs. “It certainly looks to me like we’re going to have a much slower, much more drawn-out recovery,” Mr. Parrott said.The short but sharp pandemic recession was particularly painful for those in lower-paying service jobs: Positions in retail, restaurants and hotels help underpin the city’s economy and were the first to be cut in spring 2020. The jobs have been slow to reappear while a large share of their customers — office workers — have still not returned to the city’s business districts.The story is far different for one major industry and its employees, finance, which has thrived, with companies like JPMorgan Chase posting record revenues during the pandemic.In the two previous recessions — those that started in 2000 and 2008 — Wall Street shrank and the city lost tens of thousands of high-paying finance jobs. This time, the job losses on Wall Street have been minimal, helping tax collections to hold up as the city has continued to collect income tax from high-paid professionals who are working remotely.“Wall Street is having a banner year, and they did really well last year,” said Ana Champeny, deputy research director at the Citizens Budget Commission. “That has helped prop up the city’s income tax revenues and business tax revenues.”A strong employment rebound has yet to take hold despite an easing of pandemic-related business restrictions over the summer, the ending of expanded unemployment benefits in September and the reopening of international travel last month.An estimated 800,000 New York City residents, about 10 percent of the population, were receiving the benefits when they expired. Republican lawmakers and small business owners had blamed the benefits for discouraging people from working, though recent studies have shown that the extra payments most likely had little effect on labor shortages, which have continued after the payments ended.Before the pandemic, the tourism industry in New York City employed 283,000 people, with the majority of those jobs in Manhattan. By the end of 2020, roughly a third of those positions had been eliminated, according to the New York State comptroller’s office.Roughly a third of New York City’s 283,000 tourism positions had been eliminated by the end of 2020, though visitors have started to return in greater numbers in recent weeks.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesWhen the city locked down early last year, almost all of its tour guides were laid off, and most have not been rehired, said Patrick Casey, a board member of the Guides Association of New York City who is out of work himself.He had worked as a guide for New York Water Taxi, which operated a fleet of sightseeing boats, for more than 10 years before he was furloughed at the start of the pandemic. He had to fend for himself: Federal pandemic benefits have expired, and like many workers, he had exhausted his unemployment insurance.Mr. Casey said he had hoped to be rehired, but he gave up and started collecting Social Security when he turned 65 in early December. “It’s going to take a long time for my industry to come back,” he said.The pandemic has caused many workers to re-evaluate their own priorities, placing a greater importance on work-life balance, spending time with their families and protecting their health. It has led some workers to retire, while others are reluctant to rejoin the work force if it means taking a job that requires face-to-face interaction, economists say.Louisa Tatum, a career coach at the New York Public Library in the Bronx, said that more people with college degrees were seeking advice, and workers were more selective about what jobs they were willing to accept.While some businesses are hiring and some even have major staff shortages, many workers tell her that they are willing to wait to accept a position that pays well, has consistent hours and, in a reflection of how the pandemic has shifted priorities, offers greater flexibility for remote work.“There is a desire to work remotely and for opportunities that don’t put them at risk of anything,” Ms. Tatum said. The biggest barrier, she said, is the lack of desirable openings.For some industries in New York, the pandemic simply accelerated financial pressure that already existed. Retailers were already struggling with the rise of online shopping, and empty storefronts were adding up even on famed corridors like Madison Avenue.The apparel manufacturing business, a bedrock industry in New York a century ago that employed hundreds of thousands of people, shed more than 4,000 jobs during the pandemic, leaving just 6,100 employees in the city as of October.Taylor Grant moved back home to Alabama after being laid off from her clothing designing job and decided to stay after not being able to find a new job in New York.Julie Bennett for The New York TimesTaylor Grant was among those who lost a job in the apparel manufacturing trade. Ms. Grant, 25, accepted a job in early 2019 as a clothing designer at HMS Productions, a designer and manufacturer of women’s clothes sold at shops like TJ Maxx and Marshalls. Her office was in the garment district, the once booming textile neighborhood in Midtown Manhattan.Ms. Grant said she had survived rounds of layoffs in spring 2020 and had worked remotely for a couple of months in Dothan, Ala., her hometown. She lost her job that summer.Ms. Grant said she applied for a handful of jobs in the apparel business in New York through the rest of 2020, hoping to return while she still had an apartment in the city. Not one company responded, so she stopped looking. She now works as a manager at a women’s boutique started by her mother, Frou Frou Frocks in Dothan, and has helped increase its online sales and social media presence.“I definitely thought I would be with my company for at least five years,” Ms. Grant said. “Once I realized there were no job opportunities in New York, I decided to stay in Alabama.”The Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, a union that represents more than 30,000 hotel workers in New York, still has thousands of members who have been out of work for nearly two years. The outlook is so bleak that union officials have been counseling members on how to find work in other fields, even nonunion jobs. But replacing jobs that paid $35 an hour and provided free family health care is a tall order.“We have people waiting in line and anxious to go back to work,” said Rich Maroko, president of the union. “They’re having difficulty finding full-time work.”Kazi M. Hossain, 59, had served drinks at Bar Seine in the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Manhattan for nearly 35 years when the pandemic forced the hotel to close in March 2020. It has never reopened, leaving Mr. Hossain without a full-time job for the first time since the mid-1970s.He has supported his family in Queens by taking on part-time work and borrowing $100,000 from his retirement savings. “If the hotel opens in the next three months, I could survive,” Mr. Hossain said. More

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    Better.com’s C.E.O. ‘Taking Time Off’ After Firing Workers Over Zoom

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    Better.com’s mercurial chief executive, Vishal Garg, faced swift backlash for his decision to fire more than 900 employees on a Zoom call last week. The mortgage lender’s board announced in a memo sent to staff on Friday that Mr. Garg was “taking time off” after the “very regrettable events.”“I come to you with not great news,” Mr. Garg had said to about 9 percent of his staff, in a recording since shared widely online. “If you’re on this call you are part of the unlucky group that is being laid off. Your employment here is terminated effective immediately.”Better.com, which is backed by SoftBank, has brought on a third-party firm to assess its leadership and culture, according to a copy of the board’s memo obtained by The New York Times. Several top employees resigned following the firings, two in communications and one in marketing. Better.com did not respond to a request for comment on Friday.Christian Chapman, 41, a former underwriting trainer at Better.com, said he was used to preparing for company meetings by making sure his children weren’t around, because Mr. Garg tended to use foul language. But last Wednesday, when he received an unexpected invitation to the company call with Mr. Garg, he got a sense of foreboding because the chief executive looked so solemn.As Mr. Garg impassively delivered the news, Mr. Chapman said his “gut dropped to the floor,” and he tried to message teammates to ask what was happening but his computer access was shut off almost immediately.“I’ve been through layoffs and usually there’s closure because you talk to H.R., you go to your desk and grab your personal belongings and say goodbyes,” Mr. Chapman said. “There’s no closure here. You’re staring at an empty screen in your house.”It took about three hours for him to receive a follow-up email, reviewed by The Times, that explained the terms of the termination, Mr. Chapman added. On Thursday, the company increased his termination package from one to two months of pay. He also received a Christmas package containing a trophy, certificate and company T-shirt (which his wife offered to burn).Mr. Chapman said that the chief executive’s messaging about fired employees “stealing” from the company by working only two hours a day — which the former employee said was contradicted by his team’s recent promotions and raises — had made it challenging for them to apply for new jobs.Mr. Garg has apologized for his behavior on the Zoom call. In a memo dated Tuesday that was posted on the company’s site, Mr. Garg said he owned the choice to make layoffs but had “blundered” the approach. More

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    The Work-From-Home Economy and the Urban Job Outlook

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    Restaurant Associates is not the company it used to be. It has long operated restaurants, catered events and run corporate dining rooms for clients including Google and the Smithsonian Institution. Now it employs about half of the 10,000 or so people it had on staff before the pandemic.As its lines of business dried up, the company invented new ones. It has made soups and side dishes for the online grocer FreshDirect. It has delivered meals to displaced Wall Street traders working from Connecticut, and to guests attending “virtual galas” from home.Restaurant Associates is probably going to have to keep improvising. Just as things started looking up in the summer — with some museums reopening, businesses scheduling a return to the office, and catered galas bouncing back in full force — the Delta variant of the coronavirus brought everything, again, to a halt.“We were very hopeful that by September we would start coming back strong,” said Dick Cattani, the chief executive. Now, he said, “we don’t know what’s happening, what’s next.”This anxiety is widespread across the American economy. As Kevin Thorpe, chief economist of the commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, noted, “The longer the virus lingers, the more transformative it is going to be.”A critical question is whether the urban service economy — the restaurants, hotels, taxi services and entertainment venues that employ millions of workers — can recover from the multiple waves of Covid-19 that have kept their customers away.After months of social distancing and remote work, this will depend to a large extent on how employers and workers readjust their attitude toward proximity and density — toward space.Three researchers — José María Barrero of Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago — estimate that from April to December 2020, half of the working hours in the American economy were supplied from home. After the pandemic ends, they think, the share will fall to around 20 percent. That is still four times the amount of work delivered remotely in 2017 and 2018.And remote work will be concentrated among the most highly paid workers in the most densely populated places. For instance, over half of the workers in high-skill, information-intensive services — in finance and insurance, information, professional services and management — were still working from home in January, according to researchers from Princeton, Georgetown, Columbia and the University of California, San Diego.Big cities face a dual threat of losing both their most skilled workers and the consumer service economies they sustain, the researchers wrote. “As a result,” the authors added, “they may shrink in size unless they manage to provide advantages that justify the costs of urban density when residential choices are set free from proximity-to-workplace considerations.”About 18 percent of office space in central business districts across the United States is vacant, compared with 12 percent before the pandemic, according to Cushman & Wakefield. Groupon, Twitter, United Airlines and other businesses are shedding office space. Some are rethinking their use of space entirely.Restaurant Associates, which has long operated restaurants, catered events and run corporate dining rooms, is working with about half of the 10,000 or so people it employed before the pandemic.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesAs its lines of business dried up, the company invented new ones.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesRestaurant Associates now delivers meals to guests attending “virtual galas” and Wall Street traders working from home.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe sports equipment retailer REI sold the corporate headquarters it was building in the Seattle area, meant to house some 1,800 employees, and is setting up three smaller satellite offices around the area, for workers to gravitate to if they wish. They can work entirely from home, too.“We felt there are moments when being physically together makes a difference but it doesn’t have to be all the time,” said Christine Putur, REI’s executive vice president for technology and operations. “We want to move forward with more habits, new norms — let the outcomes drive when and how we get together.”This reconfiguration of work is likely to reconfigure the American economy, changing wages and spending patterns.Google, for instance, is allowing employees to work remotely. But it will adjust compensation depending on the local cost of living. In a blog post to employees, Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, estimated that some 20 percent of them would choose to work from home permanently. And the company developed a calculator for employees to figure out the effect on their pay.Mr. Davis of the University of Chicago and his co-authors estimate that the increase in working from home will reduce spending in city centers by 5 to 10 percent, hurting business at restaurants, bars and other spots that rely on the spending of office workers.“Some of the leisure and hospitality activities will follow those people that are no longer in the downtown area,” Mr. Davis said. But the spending of newly suburbanized workers may be different, including fewer lunches and happy hours than when they worked downtown.America’s economic geography looks different from what it did two years ago. New York City’s share of the nation’s employment fell to 2.8 percent in July 2021, from 3.1 percent in July 2019. That means about 375,000 fewer jobs than if the city had at least kept pace with the country as a whole. More

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    Europe’s Pandemic Aid Is Winding Down. Is Now the Best Time?

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    Governments want vaccinations and a business rebound to carry the economy now, but cutting aid too quickly could create economic aftershocks.PARIS — After almost 18 months of relying on expensive emergency aid programs to support their economies through the pandemic, governments across Europe are scaling back some of these measures, counting on burgeoning economic growth and the power of vaccines to carry the load from here.But the insurgent spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus has thrown a new variable into that calculation, prompting concerns about whether this is the time for scheduled rollbacks in financial assistance.The tension can be seen in France, where the number of virus cases has increased more than 200 percent from the average two weeks ago, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to try to push the French into getting vaccinated by threatening to make it harder to shop, dine or work if they don’t.At the same time, some pandemic aid in France — including generous state funding that prevented mass layoffs by subsidizing wages, and relief for some businesses struggling to pay their bills — is being reduced.A government panel recently urged “the greatest caution” about winding down emergency aid even further at the end of the summer.The eurozone economy has finally exited a double-dip recession, data last week showed, reversing the region’s worst downturn since World War II. European Union governments, which have spent nearly 2 trillion euros in pandemic aid and stimulus, have released nearly all businesses from lockdown restrictions, and the bloc is on target to fully vaccinate 70 percent of adults by autumn to help cement the rebound.But the obstacles to a full recovery in Europe remain large, prompting worries about terminating aid that has been extended repeatedly to limit unemployment and bankruptcies.“Governments have provided very generous support through the pandemic with positive results,” said Bert Colijn, senior eurozone economist at ING. “Cutting the aid short too quickly could create an aftershock that would have negative economic effects after they’ve done so much.”In Britain, the government has halted grants for businesses reopening after Covid-19 lockdowns, and will end a special unemployment benefit top-up by October. At least half of the 19 countries that use the euro have already sharply curtailed pandemic aid, and governments from Spain to Sweden plan to phase out billions of euros’ worth of subsidies more aggressively in autumn and through the end of the year.Germany recently allowed the expiration of a rule excusing firms from declaring bankruptcy if they can’t pay their bills. Debt repayment holidays for companies that took cheap government-backed loans will soon wind down in most eurozone economies.And after repeated extensions, state-backed job retention schemes, which have cost European Union countries over €540 billion, are set to end in September in Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland, and become less generous in neighboring countries in all but the hard-hit tourism and hospitality sectors.Aid programs that helped cushion income losses for 60 million people at the height of the crisis continue to pay for millions of workers on standby. Businesses and the self-employed have access to billions in low-interest loans, state-funded grants and tax holidays.Meanwhile, employees have begun returning to offices, shops and factory floors. Global automakers are working to adapt to supply-chain issues. Small retailers are offering click-and-collect sales, and cafes are providing takeout service.Governments are betting that the growth momentum will be enough to wean their economies off life support.“We can’t use public money to make up for losses in the private sector forever,” said Guntram Wolff, the director of Bruegel, an economic research institution based in Brussels. “That’s why we need to find a strategy for exiting.”Governments are looking to reallocate more spending toward areas of the economy that promise future growth.“It’s crucial to shift spending towards sectors that will outlast the pandemic,” said Denis Ferrand, the director of Rexecode, a French economic research organization. “We need to accelerate a transformation in digitalization, energy and the environment.”But swaths of workers risk losing their jobs when the income support is withdrawn, especially in the hospitality and travel industries, which continue to operate at up to 70 percent below prepandemic levels. The transition is likely to be painful for many.Diners in London last week. The Bank of England expects about a quarter of a million people to lose their jobs when Britain’s furlough program ends next month.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Britain, a furlough program that has saved 12 million jobs since the start of the pandemic today keeps fewer than two million workers on standby support. But after the scheme ends in September, around a quarter of a million people are likely to lose their jobs, the Bank of England has forecast.“A significant fraction of people coming off furlough and not being rehired will find themselves facing very large drops of income,” said Tom Waters, a senior research economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London.Small businesses that wouldn’t have made it through the crisis without government assistance are now calculating how to stay on their feet without it..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Fabien Meaudre, who runs an artisanal soap boutique in central Paris, got over €10,000 in grants and a state-backed loan that allowed him to stay afloat during and after the three national lockdowns imposed in France since the pandemic hit.Now that his store is reopened, business is starting to get back to normal. “But there are no tourists, and it’s very calm,” he said.“We are very grateful for the aid we received,” Mr. Meaudre added. “But we know we will have to pay this money back.”Mr. Macron, who promised to steer Europe’s second-largest economy through Covid “no matter the cost,” is leading other countries in trying to push for a tipping point where the lockdowns that required massive government support become less and less necessary.But the Delta variant is upending even the most carefully calibrated efforts to keep economies open.In the Netherlands, where half the population is fully inoculated, the government recently reinstated some Covid restrictions days after lifting them, after Delta cases spiked.Spain and Portugal have been reeling from hotel cancellations as the variant spread in vacation hot spots that desperately need an economic boost. The Greek party island of Mykonos even banned music temporarily to stop large gatherings, sending tourists fleeing and creating fresh misery for businesses counting on a recovery.Moviegoers in France must present a “health pass” to enter the theater, which an industry group says has reduced the number of moviegoers.Rafael Yaghobzadeh/Associated PressAnd in France, trade organizations representing cinemas and sports venues are worried that Mr. Macron’s new requirement that people carry a so-called health pass — proving vaccination, a negative test or a recent Covid recovery — to get into crowded spaces is already killing a budding recovery.Some big movie halls lost up to 90 percent of customers from one day to the next when the health pass requirement went into effect this week, said Marc-Olivier Sebbag, a representative for the National Federation of French Cinemas. “It’s a catastrophe,” he said.Such precariousness helps explain why some officials are wary of letting the support expire entirely, and economists say governments are likely to have to keep spending, albeit at lower levels, well beyond when they had hoped to wind down.Withdrawing aid is “totally justified if there’s a rapid recovery,” Benoît Coeuré, a former European Central Bank governor and head of the French government panel assessing pandemic spending, told journalists last week.“But there is still uncertainty, and if the rebound doesn’t come or if it’s weaker than expected,” he said, “we’ll need to pace the removal of support.”Jack Ewing More

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    Employers Offer Incentives for Job Applicants

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    Employers are finding ways to get applicants in the door, and to retain employees once they’re hired.College subsidies for children and spouses. Free rooms for summer hotel employees and a set of knives for aspiring culinary workers. And appetizers on the house for anyone willing to sit down for a restaurant job interview.Determined to lure new employees and retain existing ones in a suddenly hot job market, employers are turning to new incentives that go beyond traditional monetary rewards. In some cases, the offerings include the potential to reshape career paths, like college scholarships and guaranteed admission to management training programs.Despite an unemployment rate of 5.8 percent in May, the sudden reopening of vast swaths of the economy has left companies scrambling for workers as summer approaches, especially in the service sector. What’s more, in many cases the inducements are on top of increases in hourly pay.The result is a cornucopia of new benefits as human resources officers and employees alike rethink what makes for a compelling compensation package. And in a pathbreaking move, some businesses are extending educational benefits to families of employees.The labor market was relatively tight before the pandemic stuck in early 2020, with an unemployment rate of 3.5 percent, but the rise of noncash offerings is a new wrinkle. Many large companies find themselves pitted against other giants in the search for workers with similar types of skills and experience and want to stand out, especially in the rush to staff back up after the pandemic.“We knew we had to do something radically different to make Waste Management attractive when you have other companies looking for the same type of worker,” said Tamla Oates-Forney, chief people officer at Waste Management. “There is such a war for talent that compensation isn’t a differentiator.”“You can never have too many drivers,” she said. “When you think about Amazon and Walmart, we’re going after the same population.”The company will pay for employees to earn bachelor’s and associate degrees, as well as certificates in areas like data analytics and business management. In a significant expansion, Waste Management will begin offering these scholarships to spouses and children of workers this year for enrollment in January.“We can do something that really changes people’s lives,” said Jim Fish, Waste Management’s chief executive. “For someone with kids in high school, this is a big deal.”JBS USA, the nation’s largest meatpacker, began offering to pay for college degrees for its 66,000 workers as well as one child per employee in March. The move followed an increase of more than 30 percent in hourly pay over the last year, said Chris Gaddis, head of human resources at JBS USA.At large beef processing plants, floor workers earn $21 an hour, with salaries rising to $30 an hour for employees with more advanced skills. “We’re seeing a lot more innovation both in terms of wages and secondary incentives, but nobody is doing what we’re doing in terms of rural America,” Mr. Gaddis said.The educational incentives at JBS and Waste Management are designed both to reduce turnover and to attract new employees. Each company fully pays tuition at a selected group of institutions; the JBS program offers a wider variety of majors and certificates. With dependents covered for schooling, careers can stretch from years to decades instead.Each time an hourly employee leaves Waste Management, it costs a minimum of $12,000 to search for and hire a replacement, Mr. Fish said. What’s more, among drivers, 50 percent of safety incidents involve those with three years or less on the job.“In terms of safety, the longer you are here, the better you are,” Mr. Fish said. And by paying for education, he added, “there is a real hook.” Waste Management estimates the cost will be $5 million to $10 million for the first year of the employee program.In the wake of the pandemic, employers are thinking more holistically about their employees and their goals, including personal and family life, said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the Indeed Hiring Lab. Extending the benefits to spouses and children seeks to address those considerations.“You can’t hide your family life,” Ms. Konkel said. “Everybody has had to wildly change what they’ve done the last 15 months.”As generous as the incentives may seem, they can be cheaper than across-the-board pay raises, said Daniel Zhao, a senior economist with the career site Glassdoor. Still, he said, “committing to a new benefit program is a pretty significant move and signals a longer-term commitment than coupons or one-time bonuses.”Nataly Mendoza Yanez joined JBS four and a half years ago as a production floor employee in Tolleson, Ariz., before moving to the human resources department. With help from the company, she is planning to study international business at nearby Glendale Community College in August.“It feels like the opportunity fell from the sky,” said Ms. Mendoza Yanez, who hopes to work for JBS’s unit in Australia one day. “I’m really excited about it. I was going to go back to school, but it’s pricey.”Nataly Mendoza Yanez, who works for JBS in Tolleson, Ariz., plans to use the company’s help to attend a community college.Caitlin O’Hara for The New York TimesThe competition for new hires is especially intense in the leisure and hospitality industry, which has surged back to life after shutting down almost completely last spring.Applebee’s is seeking to hire 10,000 people this summer and announced last month that it would hand out vouchers for a free appetizer to anyone who scheduled an interview. Hoping for 10,000 applicants, the restaurant chain got 40,000 as a result of the offer, said John Cywinski, Applebee’s president.“Our No. 1-selling category is appetizers, so we decided to offer an app for an app,” Mr. Cywinski said. “I’ve got guests coming back in droves, but I don’t have all the team members I’d like.”To attract workers this summer, Omni Hotels & Resorts is offering a range of incentives, including free hotel rooms for summer employees at some properties, as well as guaranteed entrance into the company’s management training program for staff members who stay through Labor Day. New employees will also receive three free nights at the Omni hotel of their choice.“We have put aside guest rooms in our hotels so employees wouldn’t need to worry about where they would live so they could take this job,” said Joy Rothschild, Omni’s chief human resources officer. “We have never taken guest rooms out of inventory for housing before.”Members of the culinary team will get a free set of knives, and weekly sit-downs with the executive chef in the kitchen where they work so they can tap the chef’s expertise.“We needed to do something to grab the attention of culinary students,” Ms. Rothschild said. “I’ve seen a lot of people offering monetary incentives, but we didn’t feel that was enough. The college students coming want something more than the paycheck.”Not that cash has gone completely out of style — all of Omni’s summer hires get a $250 signing bonus plus a $500 retention bonus at the end of the season.Omni has also raised pay and created new tiers in some jobs based on experience. Entry-level housekeepers earn $16 an hour at the Omni Barton Creek Resort & Spa in Austin, Texas, while those with more than two years’ experience now come in at $17 an hour.Chuck E. Cheese, the family entertainment center chain, is hiring 5,000 employees this summer and recently expanded its scholarship program. It is also offering employees $1,500 bonuses when they refer managers.Ms. Rothschild believes that the additional incentives are needed to fill the ranks. If anything, she added, new ones are on the way.“I don’t think we’re done with incentives,” she said. “We want to see how much traction we get with these, but I suspect we will be coming out with more.” More

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    Jobs Report March 2021: Gain of 916,000 as Recovery Sped Up

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    The gain of 916,000 was the biggest since August, and unemployment fell to 6 percent. Barring a setback in fighting the virus, the outlook is bullish.The American job market roared back to life in March — and with vaccinations accelerating, businesses reopening and federal aid flowing, the rebound should only get stronger from here.U.S. employers added 916,000 jobs last month, twice as many as in February and the most since August, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate fell to 6 percent, its lowest level since the coronavirus pandemic began, and nearly 350,000 people rejoined the labor force.The data was collected early in the month, before most states broadened vaccine access and before most Americans began receiving $1,400 checks as part of the latest federal relief package. It was also before the recent rise in virus cases, which economists warned could slow the recovery if it worsened. But on balance, forecasters are optimistic that hiring will remain strong in coming months.“March’s jobs report is the most optimistic report since the pandemic began,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist for the career site Glassdoor. “It’s not the largest gain in payrolls since the pandemic began, but it’s the first where it seems like the finish line is in sight.”Job growth picked up last monthCumulative change in all jobs since before the pandemic More