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    Unemployment Nears Prepandemic Level

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    Federal Reserve officials are tasked with fostering “full employment,” and while it has been difficult to guess what that means as the economy recovers from huge job losses at the start of the pandemic, March hiring data seemed likely to reaffirm to policymakers that the labor market is running hot.Now, central bankers are hoping conditions settle into a more sustainable balance.The jobless rate declined to 3.6 percent in March from 3.8 percent in February, data released Friday showed. Unemployment is rapidly closing in on the 3.5 percent unemployment rate that prevailed before the pandemic.The unemployment rate continued to fall in March.The share of people who have looked for work in the past four weeks or are temporarily laid off, which does not capture everyone who lost work because of the pandemic. More

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    Low Unemployment in Nebraska: Workers Thrive, Businesses Cope

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    Harry’s Wonder Bar is a trusted old dive in Nebraska’s capital, frequented by office clerks, construction workers and graduate students alike: the sort of wood-paneled place with a pool table in the back where phones generally stay in pockets, second fiddle to casual conversation, and beer mugs come frosted regardless of the season.As a half-dozen or so happy hour patrons gathered at the bar on a recent afternoon, most had something remarkable in common: Everybody seemed to know somebody who had earned a significant raise, or multiple raises, in the past year — and many, if not all, had received a jump in pay themselves.That included the bartender on the early-evening shift, Nikki Paulk, an easygoing woman with a flash of pink hair. “I’m in hot demand, baby,” she said, mentioning “desperate” employers with a burst of a grin. “I’ve worked at like six bars in the last six months because I just keep getting better offers I can’t turn down.”The unemployment rate in Nebraska was 2.1 percent in February, tied with Utah for the lowest in the nation and near the lowest on record for any state. In several counties, unemployment is below 1 percent. Even taking into account adults who have left the work force, the share of the population 16 and older employed in Nebraska is around 68 percent, the nation’s highest figure.After decades of wage and income stagnation, the seesaw of power between managers and their workers looks to at least temporarily be tilting in the direction of labor, with employers in competition for workers instead of the other way around. Unemployment in states including Indiana, Kansas, Montana and Oklahoma is almost as low as in Nebraska, testing the benefits and potential costs of an economy with exceptionally tight labor markets.Ms. Paulk, 35, graduated from college with a graphic design degree during the Great Recession, when jobs were scarce. She remembers working 60-hour weeks near minimum wage in Illinois, “being excited to find a quarter” that could go toward laundry. In 2013, she moved to Nebraska and took a job in medical data entry for $12 an hour.She started bartending in 2018, and since then, she says, her overall pay has more than doubled to $25 (and sometimes $30) an hour, including tips.The nationwide jobless rate in February was 3.8 percent, nearly back to prepandemic levels that were the lowest in a half-century. The particularly low unemployment in Nebraska is partly attributable to its higher-than-average high school graduation rate, and the dominant role of industries like manufacturing and agriculture that are less volatile than the service or energy sectors during downturns. Even at the peak of Covid-19 lockdowns in the spring of 2020, the state unemployment rate was 7.4 percent, half the national number.Yet the labor market in Nebraska may also be a harbinger for the country at large. Most economists expect overall unemployment to continue ticking downward this year. Job openings are near record highs, and jobless rates in January were lower than a year earlier in 388 of the 389 metropolitan areas evaluated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.Many business analysts contend that if labor remains scarce, wages will grow too rapidly and employers will continually pass on that increased expense to consumers. At least for now, evidence of such a spiral is sparse: Federal Reserve data shows that median annual pay increases are well within the range — 3 to 7 percent — that prevailed from the 1980s until the 2007-9 recession.The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob openings and the number of workers voluntarily leaving their positions in the United States remained near record levels in March.March Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 431,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent ​​in the third month of 2022.A Strong Job Market: Data from the Labor Department showed that job openings remained near record levels in February.Wages and Inflation: Economists hoped that as households shifted spending back to services, price gains would cool. Rapid wage growth could make that story more complicated.New Career Paths: For some, the Covid-19 crisis presented an opportunity to change course. Here is how these six people pivoted professionally.Return to the Office: Many companies are loosening Covid safety rules, leaving people to navigate social distancing on their own. Some workers are concerned.Unionization Efforts: The pandemic has fueled enthusiasm for organized labor. But the pushback has been brutal, especially in the private sector.The Fed, still concerned, has begun raising interest rates to cool off the economy and tame inflationary pressures. Supply chain challenges that arose during the pandemic have persisted, and the war in Ukraine is further complicating the outlook for inflation as well as overall economic growth. Consumer spending remains buoyant, yet surveys reflect dour economic sentiment among the public.In the meantime, even as price increases nag household budgets, burying the value of some new wage gains, a noticeable mass of employees and job seekers are gaining more leverage regarding benefits and conditions.Tony Goins was appointed by Gov. Pete Ricketts in 2019 as director of Nebraska’s Department of Economic Development.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesDuring a virtual summit about the local economy held in February by the nonprofit group Leadership Lincoln, Eric Thompson, the director of the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, argued that the labor market might be simply rebalancing.“Obviously, it’s still always better to be the employer than the worker, or at least usually it is,” he said. But the current environment does enable some employees to switch jobs or more easily vie for higher-level positions. Local employers are dropping degree requirements for a range of midlevel and entry roles.Many fast-food restaurants, struggling to staff locations near the $9 minimum wage in the state, have begun to offer starting wages of $14. Evidence of automation is just as rampant as Help Wanted signs: Some pharmacies dotting the main roads and highways appear to have more self-checkout kiosks than employees at a given hour.Mr. Thompson said such moves were not necessarily ominous for the working class but rather a reflection of the need for businesses to adapt while workers find jobs that can “maximize their skills and potential.”Tony Goins, a former senior vice president at JPMorgan Chase who was appointed by Gov. Pete Ricketts in 2019 as director of Nebraska’s Department of Economic Development, said the tight labor market could prompt managers to become more flexible and innovative.“At the end of the day, the market is dictating that I have to pay employees more money,” said Mr. Goins, a small-business owner himself with a cigar lounge in Lincoln. “So, I mean, how are you going to offset that?” To stay competitive in hiring, he said, managers need to improve culture, leadership, employee retention and recruiting.He spoke of his son, an assistant men’s basketball coach at Boston College — a position that he says requires continued outreach as well as the dual promise of “the chance to play for a winning program” and gaining personal development. “That’s not what C.E.O.s are used to,” he said.Businesses aiming to grow have begun to offer incentives beyond pay. The Japanese company Kawasaki Motors is spending $200 million to expand the 2.4-million-square-foot site in northern Lincoln where it makes Jet Skis, all-terrain vehicles and rail cars. It is increasing its 2,400-member work force by over 500 employees, with jobs primarily in fabrication, welding and assembly.The company is becoming more flexible about hiring and work styles in order to pull it off. “It used to take a couple of weeks to get hired at Kawasaki,” said Bryan Seck, its chief talent management strategist in Lincoln. “Now, it’s down to four hours.”With the knowledge that many parents remain on the sidelines of the work force because of child care duties, Kawasaki recently created a 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift tailored for those who need to retrieve children from school and day care in the early afternoon. Starting wages are $18.10 an hour, Mr. Seck said, with benefits including health care and a 401(k) plan.Todd Heyne, the chief construction officer at Allo Communications, a cable company based in Lincoln.Terry Ratzlaff for The New York TimesIn addition to increasing wages to retain employees, Todd Heyne, the chief construction officer at Allo Communications, a cable company based in Lincoln, said management decided that easing in-person work requirements could expand the pool of available workers. That led the company to allow many of its customer service representatives and technical support employees to train and work farther afield as it prepares to expand beyond Nebraska and Colorado.Not all problem-solving is easy. The added labor costs come on top of supply chain pressures that have increased the price of crucial materials like fiber optic cable by as much as 30 percent. Vendors are often charging 20 percent more for their contracted tasks. As a result, the company has taken steps like hiring its own trucking staff.In the end, “combined with some automation efficiencies, our team will see sizable wage increases with less rudimentary work,” Mr. Heyne said, reducing manual paperwork, centralizing back-end systems and doing more to fix customers’ network issues remotely. So despite the cost challenges, “I’ve never been more optimistic about where we’re sitting, our position in the market, how we compete against our competitors, and our technology,” he added. “Which is strange.”For many, the opportunity of this economic moment is tinged with worry. They include Ashlee Bridger, a 30-year-old student at the Lincoln campus of Southeast Community College who works in administration for the nearby firm Huffman Engineering after being recruited from a job fair.Ms. Bridger left her job as a nurse to pursue a career in human resources because she felt confident enough to bet on herself: “Of course, it was a risk. Leaving any career is.” But in the current job market, she said, “I knew I would be able to work my way up easier.”She has also had a series of life milestones fall into place. She will graduate in May with an associate degree and will start bachelor’s degree work in the fall at Nebraska Wesleyan University. The managers at Huffman have told her that she is welcome to continue working there when her schedule allows, and that they would like to hire her in a more senior role after she completes her studies.Last year, she got married in summer, then moved with her husband into a newly built house in Lincoln in August. Though they feel financially stable, she half-joked that they were lucky the home was mostly built before lumber prices soared. With prices up across the board now, “I’m more cautious about my spending,” she said.Ms. Paulk, the bartender at Harry’s thriving off better pay, has friends and customers who are upset about recent inflation. “But it’s something controlled out of our hands anyway,” she said with a shrug.“All I know,” she added, “is now I’m not broke anymore — it’s great. Life is good.” More

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    The Personal Consumption Expenditure Index Climed 6.4 Percent in February

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    Inflation continued to run at the fastest pace in 40 years in February, fresh data released on Thursday showed, at a moment when war in Ukraine and continued supply chain disruptions tied to the coronavirus promise to keep prices rising.Prices, as measured by the Personal Consumption Expenditures Index, rose by 6.4 percent in the year through February, the fastest inflation rate since 1982. They climbed 5.4 percent after stripping out food and fuel costs, which can be volatile, the data showed.That pace of increase is far faster than the 2 percent annual inflation that the Federal Reserve targets. While central bankers expect today’s rapid inflation to cool by the end of the year, falling to 4.3 percent by the final three months of 2022, that pace of increase would still be too quick for comfort.Central bankers began raising interest rates earlier this month, lifting them by a quarter percentage point, and have signaled more to come as they begin to wage an assault on rising prices. By making borrowing more expensive, the Fed can weigh on demand, allowing supply to catch up and eventually temper price increases.“There is an obvious need to move expeditiously to return the stance of monetary policy to a more neutral level, and then to move to more restrictive levels if that is what is required to restore price stability,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during a recent speech.Understand Inflation in the U.S.Inflation 101: What is inflation, why is it up and whom does it hurt? Our guide explains it all.Your Questions, Answered: Times readers sent us their questions about rising prices. Top experts and economists weighed in.Interest Rates: As it seeks to curb inflation, the Federal Reserve announced that it was raising interest rates for the first time since 2018.How Americans Feel: We asked 2,200 people where they’ve noticed inflation. Many mentioned basic necessities, like food and gas.Supply Chain’s Role: A key factor in rising inflation is the continuing turmoil in the global supply chain. Here’s how the crisis unfolded.The Personal Consumption Expenditures figures follow a more timely inflation release — the Consumer Price Index — and tend to be easy to forecast, so they do not come as a surprise to Wall Street. But because the gauge is the Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the fresh figures reinforce the challenge that economic officials face.While policymakers are watching for any sign that inflation is slowing down or is about to cool off, so far there is little to suggest a meaningful pullback. Supply chains remained stressed, and recent shutdowns in China could pose further strain. Apartment rents are climbing, elevating housing costs. Workers are in short supply and wages are rising, which could bolster inflation in other service categories.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up oil and gas prices, along with other commodity costs, which is likely to further elevate inflation when March data are released. While a few days of gas price increases happened in February, the bulk of them came this month.Companies are trying to navigate the complicated moment, gauging whether input cost increases will continue for a second year — and whether and how to pass that on to consumers.Chewy, the pet goods retailer, recently signed a new freight contract that will cost it more this year; and in the final quarter of 2021, it also faced higher labor costs. But it is hoping that those trends do not last, or that it can offset the climbing expenses through efficiencies.“As we close the book on 2021 and move forward in 2022, we are already seeing improvements in labor availability, inbound shipping costs and pricing, while out-of-stock levels and outbound shipping costs remain elevated,” Sumit Singh, the firm’s chief executive officer, said on an earnings call this week. “Ultimately, we believe most of these challenges are not permanent in nature.”Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 6What is inflation? More

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    High Inflation Could Persist as Wages Continue to Rise

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    Economists have been waiting for Americans to shift from buying goods, like furniture and appliances, and toward spending on vacations, restaurant meals and other services as the pandemic fades, betting the transition would take pressure off supply chains and help inflation to moderate.Rapid wage growth could make that story more complicated. Demand for services is rising just as many employers are struggling to find workers, which could force them to continue raising wages. While positive for workers, that could keep overall inflation brisk as companies try to cover their labor costs, speeding up price increases for services even as they begin to moderate for goods.Heavy spending on goods during the pandemic has been a driver of the recent inflation burst. Consumers began snapping up items a few months after pandemic lockdowns began and have kept on buying. Spending on services also has recovered, but much more slowly. That shift in what people are purchasing has roiled supply chains, which were not built to produce, ship and deliver so many cars, treadmills and washing machines.Policymakers spent months betting that as the virus waned and consumers resumed more normal shopping patterns, prices of goods would slow their ascent or even fall. That would pull down inflation, which has been running at its fastest pace in 40 years.But that transition — assuming it happens — may do less to cool inflation than many had hoped. A big chunk of what the government defines as “services” inflation comes from rental housing costs, which often move up alongside wage growth, as households can afford more and bid up the cost of a limited supply of housing units. And when it comes to discretionary services, like salons and gyms, labor is a major cost of production. Rising pay likely means higher prices.Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who served as a top adviser to President Barack Obama, said the shortage of workers in many service industries means that if demand for services goes up, prices will too. That means a shift in spending back to services won’t necessarily result in an overall slowdown in the pace of price increases.“An awful lot of services are incredibly constrained,” he said. “As we shift back to services, we’ll get more services inflation and less goods inflation, and I don’t think it’s at all obvious that the result of that is less inflation.”While America has gotten used to thinking about shortages in products — couches are out of stock, shoes are back-ordered — labor shortfalls could mean that services will also end up oversubscribed, allowing providers to charge more.MaidPro, a home-cleaning firm, has seen a surge in demand from professionals who are spending more time at home. But it is having trouble finding workers to keep up, said Tom Manchester, the company’s president.“Our demand right now outstrips our supply of being able to service that demand,” he said. “Demand has just continued to be strong — like double-digit strong. And if we could find qualified pros to meet the demand, we’d be even more ahead than we are today.”An Amazon employee delivering packages in Manhattan. Americans have continued to buy goods even as services have rebounded.Gabby Jones for The New York TimesMr. Manchester said hourly wages were up $1 to $3, adding to costs at a time when cleaning products have gotten pricier and higher gas prices have made travel reimbursements more expensive. MaidPro franchisees have been able to pass those costs on to their customers, both via fuel surcharges and outright price increases that have more or less kept up with inflation.So far, they have lost few customers — in part because few competitors have capacity to take on new customers.Understand Inflation in the U.S.Inflation 101: What is inflation, why is it up and whom does it hurt? Our guide explains it all.Your Questions, Answered: Times readers sent us their questions about rising prices. Top experts and economists weighed in.Interest Rates: As it seeks to curb inflation, the Federal Reserve announced that it was raising interest rates for the first time since 2018.How Americans Feel: We asked 2,200 people where they’ve noticed inflation. Many mentioned basic necessities, like food and gas.Supply Chain’s Role: A key factor in rising inflation is the continuing turmoil in the global supply chain. Here’s how the crisis unfolded.“If someone has someone that they really like coming in to clean their home, they don’t want to lose them,” he said. “They don’t want to risk saying, ‘I want to move away from MaidPro and try to find someone else,’ because in nine out of 10 instances, that someone else isn’t available.”Some economists argue that if goods inflation slows, that could still help price gains overall to moderate, even amid rising wages. Prices for products that last a long time rose 11.6 percent in the year through January, and prices for shorter-lived products like cosmetics and clothing were up 7.2 percent, still much stronger than services inflation.“We have in mind a big decline in goods prices,” said Roberto Perli, the head of global policy research at the investment bank Piper Sandler. “It would take a lot of increase in service prices to actually offset that.”Outright declines in goods prices are not guaranteed. Take cars: Rapid price growth in new and used autos was a big driver of inflation last year, and many economists expect those prices to dip in 2022. But Jonathan Smoke, the chief economist at Cox Automotive, said continued shortages mean prices for new cars are likely to continue rising, and issues with new car supply could spill over to blunt the expected decline in used car costs.And services inflation is now also coming in fast. It ran at 4.6 percent in the year through January, the quickest pace since 1989, and it has been posting large monthly gains since autumn. That is enough to keep inflation above the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent goal even if product prices stop accelerating.While goods have taken up a bigger chunk of household budgets in recent months than they did before the pandemic, Americans still spend nearly twice as much on services as on goods overall.“You don’t need a lot of extra services inflation to make up for your lost goods inflation,” Mr. Furman said.Restaurants, hotels and other discretionary services aren’t the only places where persistent demand could run up against limited supply, Mr. Furman argued. Many nonurgent health care services saw a decline in demand during the pandemic and are now experiencing a rebound amid a shortage of nurses and other skilled workers.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 6What is inflation? More

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    Workers Are Still in High Demand, Department of Labor Reports

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    Job openings last month remained near record levels, and the number of workers voluntarily leaving their positions increased, the Labor Department said on Tuesday.The data, released as part of the agency’s monthly report on job openings, layoffs and quitting, serve as indicators of how much demand there is for workers in the U.S. economy and the extent to which employers are still struggling with labor shortages months after the economy began recovering from the pandemic’s worst damage.There were about 11.3 million job openings in February, essentially the same as the month before and down a little from a record in December, though the number of hires overall edged up by 263,000 last month, to about 6.7 million.After falling during the peak of Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020, the rates at which so-called prime-age workers — those aged 25 to 54 — are working or seeking work has rallied back to prepandemic levels. Yet with the economy growing faster than in decades, demand for labor has outpaced the availability of workers — at least at the wages and benefits employers are offering.There are still roughly three million or so people who have not returned to the work force, according to the government data.“Looking at how poorly our labor force has grown so far this year, if companies want to win the war for talent they need to engage the people who may not be actively seeking work right now, or be the first option people see when they do return,” Ron Hetrick, a senior economist at Emsi Burning Glass, a data and research company, wrote in a note.That echoes the sentiment of many unions and labor activists, who have been saying that even though wage growth has picked up, people aren’t feeling valued enough by employers. It’s led to fresh questions about how bosses might get to know the “love language” of their hires and find sometimes unconventional ways to show them that they care. There are also more straightforward requests: Several progressive economists have noted that employers could, for instance, take some jobs generally expected to be low-wage — such as fast food service and cashiers — and entice workers by offering higher pay and better benefits.Large public companies and small businesses alike often say that they have already substantially raised pay from before the pandemic and that with inflation raging at highs unseen since the early 1980s, raw material and other costs have made business more difficult. An expensive surge in commodity markets suggests that price increases for food and energy could worsen, especially if firms raise prices further.Still, despite widespread frustration with inflation and shortages of some products and materials, some surveys suggest businesses are becoming more optimistic about the future. The MetLife and U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index recently reached a pandemic-era high, with about three in five of the small business owners surveyed saying their business is in good health. More

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    U.S. Employers Still Scrambling to Fill Vacancies, Report Shows

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    Job openings in the United States and the number of workers quitting their jobs remained near record highs in January, an indicator of demand for labor and of worker leverage.The data, released by the Labor Department on Wednesday as part of its monthly Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS report, was another sign of an economy that wobbled slightly yet remained sturdy when faced with the Omicron wave of the coronavirus this winter.Job openings dipped to 11.3 million, down slightly from a record in December, but were still up about 61 percent from February 2020.In a potential sign of the impact wrought by the variant’s spread, several industries that had been rebounding from the pandemic, and had been most hungry for workers, reported fewer job openings. Accommodation and food services experienced a drop of 288,000. Transportation, warehousing and utilities reported 132,000 fewer openings. But openings continued to increase in both manufacturing and the service sector at large.Some 4.3 million people left their jobs voluntarily in January, edging down somewhat from the record 4.5 million who quit in November. While layoffs picked up slightly in January, they were still hovering above historical lows.For Jeffrey Roach, the chief economist at LPL Financial, the most fascinating current in the labor market is the increased share of workers who are quitting jobs not to make a career change but simply to achieve higher pay.“You can see people are actually staying within their industry — and it really helps the ‘lower-skilled’ worker,” he said. “I think we’ll continue to see really high churn rates.”The share of Americans in their prime working years — ages 25 to 54 — who were either working or looking for work plummeted in 2020, yet it has recovered to a rate of 79.5 percent, within 1 percentage point of prepandemic levels, a much faster rebound than occurred after the last downturn.The prevailing environment is likely to increase the price of labor — a welcome development for workers who have dealt with stagnant wages and a lack of power for decades, and an unsettling one for employers as high inflation increases the cost of doing business.Some business executives and managers have expressed concern — in corporate earnings and in private calls — that “wage inflation” could set in and cut into profits if the rapid wage gains that workers achieved last year don’t taper off.“When it comes to their business, they’re very concerned about it: What does that mean to their margins going forward? What kind of pricing power do they have?” said Steve Wyett, chief investment strategist at BOK Financial, a regional bank based in Oklahoma, where unemployment is notably low at 2.8 percent. “How do we protect ourselves against this?”Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta shows that workers who quit to take other jobs are receiving larger pay increases than those who are staying put, though much of this movement is in lower-wage sectors.After the Labor Department’s employment survey showed strong wage gains in January, hourly earnings were nearly flat in February. And even if wage gains stay strong, they remain far from runaway levels.Fed data shows that median annual pay increases in the American labor market have been well within the range — 3 to 7 percent — that prevailed from the 1980s until the 2007-9 recession. More

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    Employer Practices Limit Workers’ Choices and Wages, U.S. Study Argues

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    A Biden administration report says collusion and other constraints on competition hold down pay and prospects in the labor market.The recent narrative is that there is a tight labor market that gives workers leverage. But a new report from the Biden administration argues that the deck is still stacked against workers, reducing their ability to move from one employer to another and hurting their pay.The report, released Monday by the Treasury Department, contends that employers often face little competition for their workers, allowing them to pay substantially less than they would otherwise.“There is a recognition that the idea of a competitive labor market is a fiction,” said Ben Harris, assistant Treasury secretary in the office of economic policy, which prepared the report. “This is a sea change in economics.”The report follows up on a promise made by President Biden last summer when he issued an executive order directing his administration to address excessive concentration in the market for work.Drawing from recent economic research, the report concludes that lack of competition in the job market costs workers, on average, 15 to 25 percent of what they might otherwise make. And it emphasizes that the administration will deploy the tools at its disposal to restore competition in the market for work.“This is the administration declaring where it is on the enforcement of antitrust in labor markets,” Tim Wu, a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy on the National Economic Council, said in an interview in which he laid out the report’s findings. “It is sending a strong signal about the direction in which antitrust enforcement and policy is going.”Across the economy, wage gains generally come about when a worker changes jobs or has a credible offer from outside that will encourage the current employer to provide an increase, argues Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan who was on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEmployment growth accelerated in February, as falling coronavirus cases brought customers back to businesses and workers back to the office.February Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 678,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent ​​in the second month of 2022.Wages and Prices: A labor shortage is helping to push up workers’ pay. With inflation running hot, that could be a problem for the Federal Reserve.Service Workers:  Even as employers scramble to fill vacancies, service workers are seeing few gains. Part-time work is partly to blame.Unionization Efforts: The pandemic has fueled enthusiasm for organized labor. But the pushback has been brutal, especially in the private sector.New to the Work Force: Graduating college seniors will start their career without the memory of prepandemic work life. Here is what they expect.“Companies are well aware of this,” she said in an interview, so they rally around a simple solution: “If we just stop competing, it will be better for everybody.”The Treasury report lays out the many ways in which employers do this. There are noncompete agreements that bar workers from moving to a competitor, and nondisclosure agreements that keep them from sharing information about wages and working conditions — critical information for workers to understand their options. Some companies make no-poaching deals.“There is a long list of insidious efforts to take power out of the hands of workers and seize it for employers’ gain,” said Seth Harris, deputy director at the National Economic Council and deputy assistant to the president for labor and the economy.This is happening against a backdrop of broad economic changes that are hemming in the options of many workers, especially at the bottom end of the job market.The outsourcing of work to contractors — think of the janitors, cafeteria workers and security guards employed by enormous specialist companies, not by the companies they clean, feed and protect — reduces the options for low-wage workers, the report argues.The mergers and acquisitions that have consolidated hospitals, nursing homes, food processing companies and other industries have also reduced competition for workers, the study says, curtailing their ability to seek better jobs.The report notes, for instance, that mergers trimmed the number of hospitals in the United States to 6,093 in 2021, from 7,156 in 1975. It cites research into how some of these mergers have depressed the wage growth for nurses, pharmacy employees and other health workers.The Treasury’s document is drawn from a body of research that has been growing since the 1990s, when a seminal paper by David Card and Alan B. Krueger found that raising the minimum wage did not necessarily reduce employment and could even produce more jobs.The conclusion by Mr. Card and Mr. Krueger, which economists would consider impossible in a competitive labor market in which rising labor costs would reduce employer demand, started the discipline down a path to investigate the extent to which employers competed for workers. If a few employers had the power to hold wages below the competitive equilibrium, raising the wage floor might draw more workers in.Lack of competition, the Biden administration argues, goes a long way to explain why pay for a large share of the American work force is barely higher, after accounting for inflation, than it was a half-century ago. “The fact that workers are getting less than they used to is a longstanding problem,” Ms. Stevenson, who was not involved in the Treasury report, noted.Anticompetitive practices thrive when there are fewer competitors. If workers have many potential employers, they might still agree to sign a noncompete clause, but they could demand a pay increase to compensate.Even if there is no conclusive evidence that the labor market is less competitive than it used to be, the report says, researchers have concluded that there is, in fact, very little competition.Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics at Columbia University, argues, moreover, that institutions like the minimum wage and unions, which limited employers from fully exercising their market power, have weakened substantially over time. “The previously existing checks have fallen away,” Mr. Naidu said.Unions are virtually irrelevant across much of the labor market. Only 6 percent of workers in the private sector belong to one. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is so low that it matters little even for many low-wage workers. The Treasury report argues that an uncompetitive labor market is reducing the share of the nation’s income that goes to workers while increasing the slice that accrues to the owners of capital. Moreover, employers facing little competition for workers, it argues, are more likely to offer few benefits and impose dismal working conditions: unpredictable just-in-time schedules, intrusive on-the-job monitoring, poor safety, no breaks.The damage runs deeper, the report says, arguing that uncompetitive labor markets reduce overall employment. Productivity also suffers when workers have a hard time moving to new jobs that could offer a better fit for their skills. Noncompete clauses discourage business formation when they limit entrepreneurs’ ability to find workers for their ventures.Addressing the issues that the report singles out is likely to be an uphill task. The administration’s push to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 has been unsuccessful. In Congress, bills that would ease the path for workers to join a union face long odds. Going after noncompete clauses, no-poaching deals and other forms of anticompetitive behavior would be an easier task.Last year, the Justice Department’s antitrust division brought several cases challenging no-poaching and wage-setting agreements. In January, four managers of home health care agencies in Maine were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to suppress the wages and restrict the job mobility of essential workers during the pandemic.Still, deploying antitrust enforcement in the job market is somewhat new. It has been used mostly to ward off anticompetitive behavior that raises prices for consumers in product and service markets. Persuading courts to, say, prevent a merger because of its impact on wages might be tougher.A note by the law firm White & Case, for instance, complained that the move to block Penguin Random House’s attempt to buy Simon & Schuster on the grounds that it would reduce royalties to authors is “emblematic of the Biden administration’s and the new populist antitrust movement’s push to direct the purpose of antitrust away from consumer welfare price effects and towards other social harms.” More