<!–> [–><!–> –> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>For now, consumers are still spending, although more slowly than in the past. Their attitudes about the economic outlook have soured in recent months in anticipation of elevated prices, slower growth and higher unemployment. Americans have also become choosier about how they spend their money. Leisure […] More
America is more prosperous than ever.U.S. household net worth reached a new peak at the end of 2024. The unemployment rate has levitated just above record lows for three years. The overall debt that households are carrying compared with the assets they own is also near a record low.But even a land of plenty has its shortcomings, influencing both perceptions and realities of how Americans are doing.The U.S. economy remains deeply unequal, with vast gaps in wealth and financial security persisting even as inflation has ebbed and incomes have risen. And data designed to capture the overall population may be obscuring challenges experienced by a broad range of Americans, especially those in the bottom half of the wealth or income spectrum. More
Whole Foods workers in Philadelphia are voting on whether to form the first union in the Amazon-owned chain. The company is pushing back.At a sprawling Whole Foods Market in Philadelphia, a battle is brewing. The roughly 300 workers are set to vote on Monday on whether to form the first union in Amazon’s grocery business.Several store employees said they hoped a union could negotiate higher starting wages, above the current rate of $16 an hour. They’re also aiming to secure health insurance for part-time workers and protections against at-will firing.There is a broader goal, too: to inspire a wave of organizing across the grocery chain, adding to union drives among warehouse workers and delivery drivers that Amazon is already combating.“If all the different sectors that make it work can demand a little bit more, have more control, have more of a voice in the workplace — that could be a start of chipping away at the power that Amazon has, or at least putting it in check,” said Ed Dupree, an employee in the produce department. Mr. Dupree has worked at Whole Foods since 2016 and previously worked at an Amazon warehouse.Management sees things differently. “A union is not needed at Whole Foods Market,” the company said in a statement, adding that it recognized employees’ right to “make an informed decision.”Workers said that since they went public with their union drive last fall, store managers had ramped up their monitoring of employees, hung up posters with anti-union messaging in break rooms and held meetings that cast unions in a negative light.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
A December gain of 256,000 blew past forecasts, and unemployment fell to 4.2 percent. But markets recoiled as interest rate cuts seemed more distant.Employers stuck the landing in 2024, finishing the year with a bounce of hiring after a summer slowdown and an autumn marred by disruption.The economy added 256,000 jobs in December, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The number handily beat expectations after two years of cooling in the labor market, and the unemployment rate edged down to 4.1 percent, which is very healthy by historical standards.The strong result — unclouded by the labor strikes and destructive storms of previous months — may signal renewed vigor after months of reserve among both workers and businesses. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3 percent from November, or 3.9 percent over the previous year, running well above inflation.“This employment report really crushes all expectations,” said Scott Anderson, chief U.S. economist at BMO Capital Markets. “It kind of wipes out the summer slump in payrolls we saw from June to August before the big Fed rate cut in September.”The apparent turnaround in employment growth, however, dampens chances of further interest rate cuts in the coming months. Investors already expect Federal Reserve officials to hold steady at their meeting in late January. For monetary policymakers, the robust growth means that additional easing could reignite prices and stymie progress on inflation.“The Fed is like, ‘We think this is a good labor market, we want to keep it that way, we don’t want it cooling further,’” said Guy Berger, director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute. “What they haven’t said is, ‘We want to heat the labor market back up.’”Unemployment rate More
Cargo could stop flowing at East and Gulf Coast ports, which handle most imports, if a union and an employers’ group can’t agree on the use of machines that can operate without humans.Ports on the East and Gulf Coasts could close next week if dockworkers and employers cannot overcome their big differences over the use of automated machines to move cargo.The International Longshoremen’s Association, the union that represents dockworkers, and the United States Maritime Alliance, the employers’ negotiating group, on Tuesday resumed in-person talks aimed at forging a new labor contract.After a short strike in October, the union and the alliance agreed on a 62 percent raise over six years for the longshoremen — and said they would try to work out other parts of the contract, including provisions governing automated technology, before Jan. 15.If they don’t have a deal by that date, ports that account for three-fifths of U.S. container shipments could shut, harming businesses that rely on imports and exports and providing an early test for the new Trump administration.“If there’s a strike, it will have a significant impact on the U.S. economy and the supply chain,” said Dennis Monts, chief commercial officer of PayCargo, a logistics payments platform.The union is resisting automation because it fears the loss of jobs at the ports. President-elect Donald J. Trump lent his support to the union’s position last month. “I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it,” he said on his website Truth Social. “The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.”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
The planned walkout in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle comes after talks between the company and the workers’ union failed to produce an agreement on raises.A union representing Starbucks workers said Thursday that baristas in Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle would walk off the job Friday morning and that the strikes would spread to hundreds of stores by Christmas Eve unless the company improved its wage offer in contract negotiations.The union, which represents baristas at more than 500 company-owned stores in the United States — about 5 percent of the U.S. total — said it called the strike after a bargaining session with the company this week failed to produce better wage gains.The strike is expected to begin in about 15 stores across the three metropolitan areas, according to a union member familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak publicly.“Starbucks proposed an economic package with no new wage increases for union baristas now and a guarantee of only 1.5 percent in future years,” the union, Workers United, said in a statement.The guarantee would entitle unionized Starbucks workers to receive a wage increase of 1.5 percent even if the company raises wages nationwide by less than that amount in future years. If the company raised wages by more than that — as it did this year, with a recently announced increase of 2 percent — unionized workers would get the higher amount.Andrew Trull, a Starbucks spokesman, said union delegates “prematurely ended” this week’s negotiations. “It is disappointing they didn’t return to the table given the progress we’ve made to date,” he added.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
Hiring bounced back after disruptions from storms and a major strike.Job creation bounced back in November after disruptions from storms and a major strike, reinforcing a picture of modest employment expansion over the past several months.The U.S. economy added 227,000 jobs, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department reported on Friday. With upward revisions to September and October figures, the three-month average gain is 173,000, slightly higher than the average over the six months before that.The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2 percent, from 4.1 percent in October, as fewer people were able to find work. But for those who had jobs, wages jumped more than expected and were 4 percent higher than they were a year earlier.Unemployment rate More
A plan by the Biden administration would phase out a provision that allows employers to pay workers with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage.The Biden administration on Tuesday moved to end a program that has for decades allowed companies to pay workers with disabilities less than the minimum wage.The statute, enacted as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, has let employers obtain certificates from the Labor Department that authorize them to pay workers with disabilities less than the federal minimum wage, currently $7.25 an hour. The department began a “comprehensive review” of the program last year, and on Tuesday it proposed a rule that would bar new certificates and phase out current ones over three years.“This proposal would help ensure that workers with disabilities have access to equal employment opportunities, while reinforcing our fundamental belief that all workers deserve fair compensation for their contribution,” Taryn Williams, assistant secretary of labor for disability employment policy, said on a call with reporters.As of May, about 800 employers held certificates allowing them to pay workers less than minimum wage, affecting roughly 40,000 workers, said Kristin Garcia, deputy administrator of the Labor Department’s wage and hour division.Those figures reflect a steep decline in employers’ reliance on the program in recent years: The number of workers with disabilities earning less than the minimum wage dropped to 122,000 in 2019 from 296,000 in 2010, according to a report published last year from the Government Accountability Office.Since 2019, more than half of workers employed under this program earned less than $3.50 an hour, according to the report.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
JD Vance and others on the “new right” say limiting immigration will raise wages and give jobs to sidelined Americans. Many studies suggest otherwise.As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s second administration takes shape, his plans for a signature campaign promise are becoming clear: mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, including new detention centers, workplace raids and possibly the mobilization of the military to aid in expulsions.Most economists are skeptical that this project will improve opportunities for working-class Americans. Mr. Trump and his allies don’t typically argue for purging undocumented immigrants on economic grounds; the case is more often about crimes committed by migrants, or simply a need to enforce the law.But there is an intellectual movement behind immigration restriction that seeks to reshape the relationship between employers and their sources of labor. According to this rising conservative faction, most closely identified with Vice President-elect JD Vance, cutting off the supply of vulnerable foreigners will force employers to seek out U.S.-born workers.“We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers,” Mr. Vance said in an interview with The New York Times in October, adding, “It’s one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force.”Mr. Vance is correct that the share of men in their prime working years who are in the labor force — that is, either working or looking for work — has declined in recent decades, sliding during recessions and never totally recovering. (Women in that age group, 25 to 54 years old, are working at the highest levels on record.)It seems like a simple equation: When fewer workers are available, employers have to try harder to compete for them. Certainly that dynamic played a role in the swift wage growth early in the pandemic, when people willing to do in-person jobs — waiters or nurses, for example — were in especially short supply.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
