Layoffs and Job Reductions

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    California’s Economy Pinched by Unemployment

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    Tech layoffs, fallout from Hollywood strikes and an uptick in rural joblessness challenge a state with one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates.For decades, California’s behemoth economy has outpaced those of most nations, holding an outsize role in shaping global trends in tech, entertainment and agriculture.While that reputation remains, the state has a less enviable distinction: one of the nation’s highest unemployment rates.Nationwide, the rate is 3.7 percent, and in January, the country added 353,000 jobs. California’s job growth has been slower than the nationwide average over the last year, and the unemployment rate remains stubbornly high — 5.1 percent in the latest data, a percentage point higher than a year earlier and outpaced only by Nevada’s 5.4 percent.With layoffs in the tech-centered Bay Area, a slow rebound in Southern California from prolonged strikes in the entertainment industry and varying demand for agricultural workers, California is facing economic headwinds in the new year. And residents feel it.The state has historically had higher unemployment than the U.S. average because of a work force that is younger and fast growing, said Sarah Bohn, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California. Still, she noted, the labor force shrank in California in the past six months — a troubling trend.“When looking at this shrinking, are there less opportunities and people have just stopped looking for work?” Ms. Bohn asked. “What will this mean for consumers and businesses?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Can a Tech Giant Be Woke?

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    The December day in 2021 that set off a revolution across the videogame industry appeared to start innocuously enough. Managers at a Wisconsin studio called Raven began meeting one by one with quality assurance testers, who vet video games for bugs, to announce that the company was overhauling their department. Going forward, managers said, the lucky testers would be permanent employees, not temps. They would earn an extra $1.50 an hour.It was only later in the morning, a Friday, that the catch became apparent: One-third of the studio’s roughly 35 testers were being let go as part of the overhaul. The workers were stunned. Raven was owned by Activision Blizzard, one of the industry’s largest companies, and there appeared to be plenty of work to go around. Several testers had just worked late into the night to meet a looming deadline.“My friend called me crying, saying, ‘I just lost my job,’” recalled Erin Hall, one of the testers who stayed on. “None of us saw that coming.”The testers conferred with one another over the weekend and announced a strike on Monday. Just after they returned to work seven weeks later, they filed paperwork to hold a union election. Raven never rehired the laid-off workers, but the other testers won their election in May 2022, forming the first union at a major U.S. video game company.It was at this point that the rebellion took a truly unusual turn. Large American companies typically challenge union campaigns, as Activision had at Raven. But in this case, Activision’s days as the sole decision maker were numbered. In January 2022, Microsoft had announced a nearly $70 billion deal to purchase the video game maker, and the would-be owners seemed to take a more permissive view of labor organizing.The month after the union election, Microsoft announced that it would stay neutral if any of Activision’s roughly 7,000 eligible employees sought to unionize with the Communications Workers of America — meaning the company would not try to stop the organizing, unlike most employers. Microsoft later said that it would extend the deal to studios it already owned.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    U.S. Economy: Has an Era of Increased Productivity Returned?

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    Thirty years ago, the U.S. entered an era of productivity gains that enabled healthy growth. Experts are asking if it could happen again.The last time the American economy was posting surprising economic growth numbers amid rapid wage gains and moderating inflation, Ace of Base and All-4-One topped the Billboard charts and denim overalls were in vogue.Thirty years ago, officials at the Federal Reserve were hotly debating whether the economy could continue to chug along so vigorously without spurring a pickup in inflation. And back in 1994, it turned out that it could, thanks to one key ingredient: productivity.Now, official productivity data are showing a big pickup for the first time in years. The data have been volatile since the start of the pandemic, but with the dawn of new technologies like artificial intelligence and the embrace of hybrid work setups, some economists are asking whether the recent gains might be real — and whether they can turn into a lasting boom.If the answer is yes, it would have huge implications for the U.S. economy. Improved productivity would mean that firms could create more product per worker. And a steady pickup in productivity could allow the economy to take off in a healthy way. More productive companies are able to pay better wages without having to raise prices or sacrifice profits.Several of the trends in place today have parallels with what was happening in 1994 — but the differences explain why many economists are not ready to declare a turning point just yet.The Computer Age vs. the Zoom AgeBy the end of the 1980s, computers had been around for decades but had not yet generated big gains to productivity — what has come to be known as the productivity paradox. The economist Robert Solow famously said in 1987, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    For Michigan’s Economy, Electric Vehicles Are Promising and Scary

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    Last fall, Tiffanie Simmons, a second-generation autoworker, endured a six-week strike at the Ford Motor factory just west of Detroit where she builds Bronco S.U.V.s. That yielded a pay raise of 25 percent over the next four years, easing the pain of reductions that she and other union workers swallowed more than a decade ago.But as Ms. Simmons, 38, contemplates prospects for the American auto industry in the state that invented it, she worries about a new force: the shift toward electric vehicles. She is dismayed that the transition has been championed by President Biden, whose pro-labor credentials are at the heart of his bid for re-election, and who recently gained the endorsement of her union, the United Automobile Workers.The Biden administration has embraced electric vehicles as a means of generating high-paying jobs while cutting emissions. It has dispensed tax credits to encourage consumers to buy electric cars, while limiting the benefits to models that use American-made parts.But autoworkers fixate on the assumption that electric cars — simpler machines than their gas-powered forebears — will require fewer hands to build. They accuse Mr. Biden of jeopardizing their livelihoods.“I was disappointed,” Ms. Simmons said of the president. “We trust you to make sure that Americans are employed.”Tiffanie Simmons works in Wayne, Mich., at a Ford Motor factory that builds Broncos.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesMs. Simmons’s union has endorsed President Biden, but “I was disappointed” in him, she said.Nick Hagen for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Job Market Starts 2024 With a Bang

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    U.S. employers added 353,000 jobs in January, far exceeding forecasts, and revised figures showed last year was even stronger than previously reported.The United States produced an unexpectedly sizable batch of jobs last month, a boon for American workers that shows the labor market retains remarkable strength after three years of expansion.Employers added 353,000 jobs in January on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent.The report also put an even shinier gloss on job growth for 2023, including revisions that added more than 100,000 to the figure previously tallied for December. All told, employers added 3.1 million jobs last year, more than the 2.7 million initially reported.After the loss of 14 percent of the nation’s jobs early in the Covid-19 pandemic, the labor market’s endurance despite aggressive interest rate increases has caught economists off guard.“I think everyone is surprised at the strength,” said Sara Rutledge, an independent economics consultant. “It’s almost like a ‘pinch me’ scenario.”Ms. Rutledge helped tabulate the National Association for Business Economics’ latest member survey, which found rising optimism that the country would avoid a recession — matching a turnaround in measures of consumer sentiment as inflation has eased.Unemployment has been under 4 percent for 24 monthsUnemployment rate More

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    The U.S. Seems to Be Dodging a Recession. What Could Go Wrong?

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    Economists have become increasingly optimistic about the odds of a soft landing. But as 2024 begins to unfold, risks remain.With inflation falling, unemployment low and the Federal Reserve signaling it could soon begin cutting interest rates, forecasters are becoming increasingly optimistic that the U.S. economy could avoid a recession.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Wells Fargo last week became the latest big bank to predict that the economy will achieve a soft landing, gently slowing rather than screeching to a halt. The bank’s economists had been forecasting a recession since the middle of 2022.Yet if forecasters were wrong when they predicted a recession last year, they could be wrong again, this time in the opposite direction. The risks that economists highlighted in 2023 haven’t gone away, and recent economic data, though still mostly positive, has suggested some cracks beneath the surface.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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

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

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    U.S. Job Openings Dropped in October

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    The News:Job openings fell considerably in October, hitting the lowest level since March 2021, the Labor Department announced on Tuesday.There were 8.7 million job openings in October, down significantly from 9.3 million in September, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. That was lower than economists’ expectations of 9.3 million openings.The rate of layoffs was little changed, as was the rate of quitting, which generally reflects workers’ confidence in their ability to find new employment.Job openings declined significantly in October, the Labor Department said.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWhy It Matters: The state of the labor market affects interest rate policy.The labor market is closely watched by the Federal Reserve as it mulls its interest rate policy. A cooling labor market tends to fuel predictions that the Fed will not further increase rates, which have risen to a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent from nearly zero in March 2022.The labor market has been surprisingly resilient since the Fed started its rate increases in a campaign to tame inflation. But as the job market shows signs of cooling, so has consumer spending. Many companies told investors that in the most recent quarter customers were pulling back and spending less on products and more on services and experiences. The Fed’s preferred inflation measure confirmed that consumer spending slowed in October.At the same time, investors are increasingly hopeful that the Fed is done raising rates. Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, recently suggested in a speech that the central bank would leave rates steady if data continued to point to a cooling economy. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield fell on Tuesday, reaching its lowest point since September, as investors expected interest rates to fall in the future.A reduction in job opportunities discourages the Fed from raising rates or keeping them high too long because such a trend often foreshadows a recession. “With this evidence coming in that the labor market is cooling substantially, I think it’s raising the chances that the Fed is done with the rate hikes,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter.Background: Unemployment and openings have reverted to earlier levels.Though the labor market is slowing, it remains a healthy landscape for workers. The unemployment rate ticked up in October, to nearly 4 percent, which is in line with prepandemic levels.Job openings reached a record of more than 12 million in March 2022 and have trended down since. The last time job openings hovered around nine million — where it is now — was in the spring of 2021.There are still ample opportunities for workers. The rate of hiring remained steady in October despite the decline in openings.One difference is that layoffs are lower than they were before the pandemic. That probably reflects companies’ decisions to reduce staffing by natural attrition rather than cuts.“This is perhaps the biggest sign that we still have a strong economy and labor market,” said Sonu Varghese, a strategist at Carson Group, a financial advisory firm.Though inflation has slowed significantly since the Fed started raising rates in March 2022, it remains above the central bank’s 2 percent target.The Fed’s preferred inflation measure fell to 3 percent in October from a year earlier. But without including food and fuel prices, which are volatile and less sensitive to the Fed’s policy actions, the rate was 3.5 percent.What’s next: The November jobs report comes on Friday.The November jobs report will be released on Friday by the Labor Department. Economists forecast that the unemployment rate will stay around 4 percent, with a gain of about 180,000 jobs.That report will be one of the last insights into the state of the labor market before the Fed’s next policy meeting on Dec. 12 and 13. More