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Labor Dept. Proposes Vast Expansion of Overtime Eligibility

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The Biden administration seeks a threshold of about $55,000 in annual pay under which salaried workers must receive overtime, up from $35,500.In a move that could affect millions of workers, the Biden administration announced Wednesday that it was proposing to substantially increase the cutoff below which most salaried workers automatically receive time-and-a-half overtime pay.Under the proposed rule, issued by the Labor Department, the cutoff for receiving overtime pay after 40 hours a week would rise to about $55,000 a year from about $35,500, a level that was set during the Trump administration.About 3.6 million salaried workers, most of whom fall between the current cutoff and the new one, would effectively gain overtime pay eligibility under the proposed rule, the department said.Julie Su, the department’s acting secretary, said in a statement that the rule “would help restore workers’ economic security by giving millions more salaried workers the right to overtime protections.”The department estimated that the rule would result in a transfer of $1.2 billion from employers to employees in its first year.Some industry groups, particularly in retail, dining and hospitality businesses, have argued that expanded overtime eligibility could lead many employers to convert some salaried workers to hourly workers and set their base wage so that their overall pay, with the usual overtime hours, would be unchanged.These groups argue that vastly expanding overtime eligibility could also discourage employers from promoting workers to junior management positions that provide a path to well-paying careers, because more employers would be compelled to pay junior managers overtime when they worked long hours.“To prevent these employees from triggering new overtime costs, many small businesses will be forced to demote them back to hourly wage earners, reversing their hard-earned career progression,” Alfredo Ortiz, the president and chief executive of Job Creators Network, a group that promotes the interests of small businesses, said in a statement.The proposal follows a similarly ambitious move by the Obama administration in 2016, which sought to raise the overtime cutoff for most salaried employees to about $47,500 from about $23,500. But just before Donald J. Trump took office as president, a federal judge in Texas suspended the Obama rule, concluding that the Labor Department lacked the legal authority to raise the overtime cutoff so substantially.The Trump administration later installed the $35,500 limit.Under the Biden administration’s proposal, the overtime limit would automatically adjust every three years to keep pace with rising earnings. The Labor Department will accept public comments for 60 days before issuing a final version of the rule.Advocates of a higher cutoff argue that one key benefit would be to prevent employers from misclassifying workers as managers to avoid paying them overtime.Under the law, employers do not need to pay overtime to workers who make above the salary cutoff if they are bona fide executives or managers, meaning that their primary job is management and that they have real authority.But research has shown that many companies illegally deny workers overtime by raising their salaries just above the overtime cutoff and simply labeling them managers, even if they do little managerial work.Because the legal definition of an overtime-exempt manager can be somewhat subjective, and because many salaried workers aren’t aware that they are eligible for overtime pay if they make more than the cutoff, they typically do not challenge employers who game the system in this way. The result is that many assistant managers at fast food restaurants or retail outlets have been denied overtime pay even though the law typically required that they receive it.Raising the salary threshold would make this practice less common by eliminating the subjectivity in determining which workers should receive overtime pay. Instead, many workers — like assistant managers in restaurants — would become eligible for overtime automatically, no matter their job responsibilities.The proposal is the latest effort by the Biden administration to increase pay and protections for workers. President Biden has been outspoken in his support of labor unions, and issued an executive order requiring contractors on federal construction projects worth more than $35 million to reach agreements with unions that determine wages and work rules.The major climate bill that Mr. Biden signed last year included incentives for clean energy projects to pay wages that are similar to union scale.But the proposed overtime rule could face legal challenges like the ones that derailed the Obama-era rule, suggesting that the president’s rationale for the proposal may be as much about communicating his support for workers during the 2024 presidential campaign as it is about significantly expanding eligibility for overtime.In an interview this year, Seth Harris, a former deputy labor secretary who recently served as a senior labor adviser to Mr. Biden, said some administration officials worried that a judge would set aside the rule, but added, “There are others whose offices are physically closer to the president who say, ‘No, no, no, this District Court judge doesn’t tell us how we do our business.’” More

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    Chipotle Agrees to Pay Over $20 Million to Settle New York City Workplace Case

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    New York City said Tuesday that it had reached a settlement potentially worth more than $20 million with the fast-food chain Chipotle Mexican Grill over violations of worker protection laws, the largest settlement of its kind in the city’s history.The action, affecting about 13,000 workers, sends a message “that we won’t stand by when workers’ rights are violated,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement.The city said the settlement covered violations of scheduling and sick leave laws from late November 2017 to late April of this year. Under the settlement, hourly employees of Chipotle in New York City will receive $50 for each week that they worked during that period. Employees who left the company before April 30 will have to file a claim to receive their compensation.The Fair Workweek Law enacted by the city in 2017 requires fast-food employers to provide workers with their schedules at least two weeks in advance or pay a bonus for the shifts.The employers must also give workers at least 11 hours off between shifts on consecutive days or get written consent and pay them an extra $100. And the employers must offer workers more shifts before hiring additional employees, to make it easier for them to earn a sustainable income.Under a separate city law, large employers like Chipotle must provide up to 56 hours of paid sick leave per year.The city accused Chipotle of violating all these policies.“We’re pleased to be able to resolve these issues,” Scott Boatwright, the company’s chief restaurant officer, said in a statement. Mr. Boatwright added that the company had carried out a number of changes to ensure compliance with the law, such as new time-keeping technology, and that Chipotle looked forward to “continuing to promote the goals of predictable scheduling and access to work hours for those who want them.”The city filed an initial legal complaint in the case, involving a handful of Chipotle stores, in September 2019, then expanded the case last year to include locations across the city. At the time, the city said the company owed workers over $150 million for the scheduling violations alone. Advocates for the workers said civil penalties could far exceed that amount.In addition to as much as $20 million in compensation, Chipotle will pay $1 million in civil penalties. A city spokeswoman said the settlement was the fastest way to win relief for workers.The city said in its statement that it had closed more than 220 investigations and obtained nearly $3.4 million in fines and restitution under the scheduling law, and that it had closed more than 2,300 investigations and obtained nearly $17 million in fines and restitution under the sick leave law. Neither figure includes the settlement announced Tuesday.The city spokeswoman said the city had filed more than 135 formal complaints under the two laws, and that many employers settle before the city can file a case.Chipotle faces pressure over its labor practice on other fronts. Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union, which helped prompt the investigation at Chipotle by filing initial complaints in the case, is seeking to unionize Chipotle workers in the city.Chipotle employees at stores in Maine and Michigan have filed petitions for union elections. The Maine store has been closed, a move that the employees assert was retaliation for the organizing effort. Chipotle has said the closing was a result of staffing issues and had “nothing to do with union activity.” More

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    Starbucks Is Moving to Oust Workers in Buffalo, Union Supporters Say

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    Some employees who back unionization efforts have been told they must increase their work availability or leave. The company cites scheduling issues.Workers at Starbucks stores in Buffalo are accusing the company of retaliating against union supporters by telling some of them they may have to leave the company if they cannot increase their work availability.At least five of the cases have arisen at a store that unionized in December, though union supporters at other Buffalo-area stores report similar conversations with managers, frequently but not always involving pro-union employees. The company denies any connection between the scheduling issues and union activities and says the matter is strictly logistical.The tensions indicate how labor relations are playing out after initial successes in unionizing company stores. None of Starbucks’s roughly 9,000 corporate-owned stores in the United States were unionized before early December, but three have unionized since then, and workers at more than 100 stores across the country have filed for union elections.One of the Buffalo workers, Cassie Fleischer, said her manager told her on Feb. 20 that she would soon no longer be employed at the store where she had worked since 2020 because she had sought to reduce her hours from around 30 to 15, a change the manager said she could not accommodate. The store was recently unionized, and Ms. Fleischer is a prominent union supporter.Kellen Montanye, who works at the same store, said the manager told him in a meeting Sunday that he would have to decide this week if he could increase his availability to 15 or 20 hours or leave the company. Mr. Montanye was also outspoken in supporting the union.“This new policy is a complete betrayal of the promise made by Starbucks to its partners, to schedule us around our other jobs or our school hours,” Starbucks Workers United, the union representing the workers, said in a statement, using the company’s term for its employees. “This is a part of Starbucks’s broader strategy to bust our union.”News that the company was asking some employees to be available to work more hours or leave was reported earlier by the labor-oriented website More Perfect Union.Reggie Borges, a Starbucks spokesman, said that the company was not firing the workers and that there was no policy requiring minimum availability. The company generally tries to honor employees’ preferences on availability, he said, but it cannot guarantee that it will do so, especially when several employees request more limited availability around the same time.Mr. Borges said that 10 people at Ms. Fleischer’s and Mr. Montanye’s store, on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo, had made such requests recently, out of a total of about 27 workers there.Union supporters said they had not previously faced resistance when making such requests. Many union supporters were also skeptical that 10 workers at the Elmwood store had asked to scale back their hours in ways that posed an unusual challenge for management. A recording of a meeting between Ms. Fleischer and her manager, provided to a reporter by the union, seemed to indicate that the number was lower.“There’s your shift and a couple other people that really, with the hours that I — I just, I don’t have the quite the availability,” the manager told Ms. Fleischer. If fewer workers had sought significant reductions in availability, that would presumably be easier to accommodate.The manager appeared to acknowledge in the recording that the refusal to grant the reduction in hours was a break with her previous approach. “There’s certain things that I have to take care of as well, that maybe I didn’t do the right way before, but I have to get on board,” the manager said.Mr. Montanye, a graduate student at the University at Buffalo, said that he had worked at Starbucks since 2018 and at the Elmwood store for roughly one year, and that he had frequently adjusted his hours. He said he typically worked nearly full time during winter and summer breaks and only one or two days a week while school was in session. His managers had never taken issue with these requests, he added.But at an initial meeting on Feb. 13, he said, his manager told him that his current schedule of one day a week no longer met the store’s “needs” and that he would have to provide 15 or 20 hours of weekly availability to stay on the schedule. At a follow-up meeting over the weekend, he said, the manager told him to decide this week whether he could provide the additional availability. He may seek a leave of absence instead.The Starbucks store on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo. Union supporters were skeptical that 10 workers at the store had asked to scale back their hours.Mustafa Hussain for The New York TimesMs. Fleischer had worked at Starbucks for over four years, and at the Elmwood store since the summer of 2020. She was typically scheduled for about 33 or 34 hours a week during the second half of last year. But she began looking for additional work elsewhere to cover expenses after her scheduled hours dropped somewhat in January.She asked to scale back to 15 hours a week upon finding a second job, at which point her manager told her in an initial meeting in early February that the more limited availability didn’t meet the “needs of the business,” according to Ms. Fleischer.In her final meeting with her manager, which Ms. Fleischer recorded on Feb. 20, the manager said that she had not put Ms. Fleischer on the schedule for the next two weeks and that, after a certain number of weeks of being unscheduled, Ms. Fleischer would be “termed out” — that is, no longer employed by Starbucks. She is scheduled to meet with her district manager to discuss the issue on Mar. 7.Ms. Fleischer said she would have been unlikely to look for a second job had her hours not dropped in January. Hours at Starbucks tend to fall somewhat during the slow months of January and February, but Ms. Fleischer and Mr. Montanye said they believed the changes were also driven by the addition of several new workers to the store in the fall.The union has said the fall hiring was intended to dilute union support ahead of an election at the store; the company has said the hiring was intended to address understaffing. Mr. Borges said that a similar number of workers had left the store since then and that hours had been fairly consistent.An employee at another Starbucks in Buffalo, Roisin Doherty, said her store also cut back her hours. In late January she too took another job, then informed her manager that she would need to change her availability to weekends only. Screenshots provided by Ms. Doherty show that the manager congratulated her through a messaging app and did not indicate that the new constraints would be a problem. But in early February the manager wrote that she would need “at least four days” of availability. Workers at her store filed for a union election in between the two exchanges, on Jan. 31, and Ms. Doherty has helped lead the union campaign, though she said another worker who is not identified with the union had also been told that his availability was insufficient.Ms. Doherty said that she remained on the schedule and that she had yet to have a second interaction with a manager forcing the issue.Mr. Borges, the Starbucks spokesman, said Ms. Doherty’s hours were reduced after she was given a written warning about tardiness and attendance issues. He said managers would continue contacting employees when necessary to explain that narrow availability could lead them to go unscheduled for a few weeks, which could ultimately cause their separation from the company.“Leaders are trying to make sure partners understand that the lack of availability could lead to that,” Mr. Borges said in an email. More

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    Covid, inflation and a loss of aid crimped American incomes in January.

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    Soaring coronavirus caseloads, rising prices and a falloff in government aid combined to take a bite out of Americans’ incomes in January.After-tax income rose just 0.1 percent last month, the Commerce Department said Friday. That was the slowest growth since June. Adjusted for inflation, after-tax income fell 0.5 percent, the sixth consecutive monthly decline.Incomes were affected by the spike in coronavirus cases associated with the Omicron variant, which kept millions of employees home from work in January. Earlier data from the Labor Department showed that total hours worked fell early in the month, despite continued job growth.January was also the first month since mid-2021 in which parents did not receive payments under the expanded child tax credit, which expired at the end of last year. Income from government programs fell 1.3 percent last month.Yet despite the crimp in incomes, Americans continued to spend. Consumer spending rose 2.1 percent in January. Even after adjusting for inflation, spending was up 1.5 percent.Spending on goods was particularly strong, continuing the pandemic-era pattern that has put pressure on global supply chains. But spending on services also rose modestly, suggesting that the Omicron wave did not derail the recovery on the services side of the economy. More

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    Architects at a prominent New York firm drop their unionization bid.

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    Less than two months after seeking to form the only union at a prominent U.S. architecture firm, workers at SHoP Architects, in New York, have formally ended their effort.“We never imagined we would have to write this statement, but after a difficult unionizing attempt that was met with a powerful anti-union campaign, we have decided to withdraw our petition,” the group, which calls itself Architectural Workers United, said in a statement on Thursday.The statement did not provide examples of anti-union activity, but added: “We have seen how the fear of the unknown, along with misinformation, can quickly overpower individual imaginations of something greater than the status quo.”SHoP, in a statement, said the group’s decision to withdraw an election petition filed with the National Labor Relations Board “reflects our staff’s clear desire to determine our collective future together as an employee-owned firm.” The company said that “any allegations of bad faith campaigning are unfounded and an attempt to undermine the strong majority of SHoP employees who made their views known.”The organizing campaign was a response to long-simmering tensions in the architecture profession, where workers often accumulate tens of thousands of dollars in debt in college and graduate school but earn modest salaries while working long hours.The campaign also appeared to reflect a growing interest in unionizing among white-collar professionals, such as tech workers, doctors, journalists and academics, who have formed unions during the past decade as a way to address a loss of professional autonomy in addition to low wage growth and job security.At SHoP, a high-profile firm of about 135 employees that is known for work on such projects as the Barclays Center in Brooklyn and a Manhattan luxury building once known as the Steinway Tower, several employees said they worked 50 hours a week on average and 60 or 70 hours a week every month or two when a big deadline loomed.Typical of the industry, many who worked these hours over the past few years were junior architects earning $50,000 to $80,000 a year — higher than average for all workers, but low given the profession’s schooling requirements. According to a report last year from the American Institute of Architects, an industry group, few architects have annual salaries above the $100,000-to-$120,000 range, and many make less, a decade or more into their careers.The organizing campaign at SHoP appears to have been touched off by the economic uncertainty introduced by the pandemic, as well as the toll on employees of working long hours remotely. “Many of us feel pushed to the limits of our productivity and mental health,” employees wrote in a letter to the firm’s leadership announcing the union in December.Among other changes, supporters had hoped that a union could help rein in the practice of uncompensated or undercompensated overtime, which is common in the industry. But skeptics within the profession warned that such changes could backfire, raising labor costs that rival firms could undercut when bidding on a project.In response to the initial union announcement, SHoP indicated that it was sensitive to workers’ concerns about pay and hours, saying it had recently turned down several projects that it did not believe would generate enough revenue to staff appropriately. The firm also said it preferred to employ architects on a long-term basis rather than to staff up and down as projects came and went, as some competitors seek to do.Even employees favoring unionization said the firm’s labor practices were better than average for the industry — noting that the firm pays its interns, for example.The effort to organize prominent architecture firms does not appear to have died with the union drive at SHoP. Workers at two other prominent architecture firms were in the process of organizing when workers at SHoP went public in December, said David DiMaria, an organizer with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, with which the SHoP architects had hoped to affiliate.In an interview this week, Mr. DiMaria said that those efforts were continuing, and that workers at five other firms had reached out to the union and begun organizing since then.“This has started a conversation around the value of architectural work, and the realization that without leverage, there will never be value,” Mr. DiMaria said of the SHoP campaign. “The organizing is going to continue because it’s the only way to fix these problems.” More

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    Dollar Stores Hit a Pandemic Downturn

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    Sandra Beadling was fed up with the 70-hour workweeks, the delivery trucks running days behind schedule, and the wear and tear on her knees from all the stooping to restock the bottom shelves.The manager of the Dollar General store in Wells, Maine, Ms. Beadling, 54, had tried to hire more help. But that was a tough sell when Walmart was offering $16 an hour and her store was paying $12.Ms. Beadling had spent long stretches this summer as one of only a few workers in the store, tending to the register and trying to help shoppers. She had pleaded with her managers to allow the store’s part-time workers to have more hours, but to no avail.One night last month, Ms. Beadling closed up the Dollar General at 10, got home at 11:30 and then left her house at 4 a.m. to be back at the store for an inventory check. “I was so tired I couldn’t find words,” she said. She sent her assistant manager a text saying she had quit and then blocked her co-workers’ numbers so they couldn’t call back and persuade her to stay.“It wasn’t sustainable,” Ms. Beadling said.Some wonder whether the same can be said for the unbridled success of dollar stores and their business model, which has benefited from the prevalence of poverty and disinvestment in the inner cities and rural America. Dollar stores, which pay among the lowest wages in the retail industry and often operate in areas where there is little competition, are stumbling in the later stages of the pandemic.Sales are slowing and some measures of profit are shrinking as the industry struggles with a confluence of challenges. They include burned-out workers, pressure to increase wages, supply chain problems and a growing number of cities and towns that are rejecting new dollar stores because, they say, the business model harms their communities.Just this week, Dollar Tree, which also operates Family Dollar stores, said it would start selling more products above $1. The move has broad significance beyond the discount retail industry, analysts say, because it signals that a company that has built its brand on selling $1 merchandise feels the need to shift its model to account for higher wages and an unreliable supply line from Asia.“It means these issues may be permanent,” said Scott Mushkin, a founder and an analyst at R5 Capital, a research and consulting firm focused on retail.The dollar store strategy has struggled in an economy like the current one.Edmund D. Fountain for The New York TimesThe troubles follow a year of soaring profits and a period of staggering growth in the industry. Roughly one in every three stores that have been announced to open in the United States this year is a dollar store, according to Coresight Research, a retail advisory firm, a sign of how well the industry did in 2020.The business model, which relies on relatively cheap labor and inexpensive goods, is designed to flourish even when its core customers are hurting financially. The strategy was honed during the high unemployment and wage stagnation of the Great Recession of 2008.But dollar stores are not as well equipped for the surreal economy of today, when workers like Ms. Beadling are quitting in protest and a single coronavirus case on a container ship can cause a two-month delay in getting Chinese-made merchandise to the United States.“This is another case of the pandemic laying bare the underlying vulnerabilities in how we’ve set up our economy,” said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an advocacy group that is critical of many large corporate retailers.While just about every retailer is dealing with shipping and distribution problems, the dollar stores may have difficulty passing on the increased costs to price-sensitive customers.Dollar Tree said it expected as much as $200 million in additional freight costs this year.In an August conference call with analysts, Dollar Tree’s chief executive, Michael Witynski, recounted how one of the shipping vessels the company had chartered was denied entry to a Chinese port after a crew member tested positive for the virus. The ship had to change crews in Indonesia before returning to China.Dollar General added 50,000 workers this summer, the retailer said.Simon Simard for The New York TimesThe store in Eliot, Maine, where another manager recently quit.Simon Simard for The New York TimesMr. Mushkin said of Dollar Tree: “They have everything going the wrong way.”Dollar General said it had hired 50,000 additional workers between mid-July and Labor Day, but acknowledged in August that its labor costs were adding to expenses. Analysts say some of these additional expenses are driven by the pressure to raise wages.Still, the higher pay may not be enough to encourage employees to stay on the job. Workers say the stores are chronically understaffed and rely on part-time workers who are given unpredictable schedules and cannot afford the required employee contribution for health care benefits.In a statement, Dollar General said, “We pay competitive wages, which are determined based on several factors including the relevant labor market.” The company added that “our operating standards are designed to provide stores with sufficient labor hours, and it is not our expectation that store managers should work 70 to 80 hours per week.”Part-time workers sometimes encounter the opposite problem of not having enough work. As a store manager, Ms. Beadling said, she was constantly trying to find additional hours to give to her employees who needed the money, including one worker who was living in a tent because she couldn’t afford rent.But the allotted hours for the store were limited by higher-up managers, she said. This summer, social media buzzed with photos of dollar stores, from Lincoln, Neb., to Pittsburgh and beyond, where employees had taped up signs in the front door announcing that they had walked off the job.“Capitalism will destroy this country,” read one sign in the window of a Dollar General in Eliot, Maine, this spring. “If you don’t pay people enough to live their lives, why should they slave away for you?”Paige Murdock, the former Dollar General manager in Eliot, now works in a coffee warehouse and delivers for DoorDash.Simon Simard for The New York TimesPaige Murdock, a manager of the Eliot store, was the first to quit. The company limited the hours she could give to her staff, she said, which often meant she was running the store short-handed.She went weeks without getting a day off or seeing her family but, as a salaried employee, did not receive overtime pay. When a manager said Ms. Murdock, 44, couldn’t take her previously approved vacation week to help her daughter, who is in the military, move to Texas, she decided to quit.“If you look at my résumé, I am a very loyal employee,” Ms. Murdock said. “I will work my heart out. All the other jobs I left I would give two weeks’ notice. I don’t call out. I don’t ask for much.”Mr. Murdock now works in a warehouse for a coffee company and picks up delivery jobs at DoorDash to fill in the gaps.In its statement, Dollar General said its manager turnover “has been at historically low levels over the past few years.”Chris Burton started working at a Dollar General in New Orleans in the spring of 2020, earning $10 an hour. A saxophonist, he took the job because his work as a substitute teacher and his musical performances had been put on hold during the pandemic. More than a year later, his hourly pay has nudged up only to $11.“Walmart will move you up to $15 much faster,” said Mr. Burton, 34, who works with Step Up Louisiana, a labor advocacy group that has been pushing for improved working conditions in dollar stores. “But Dollar General is never going to pay as much as Walmart. That’s how they keep their prices lower. It’s basic economics.”Chris Burton took a $10-an-hour job at a Dollar General in New Orleans because the pandemic put his substitute teaching and music performances on hold.Edmund D. Fountain for The New York TimesWall Street is also taking note of the low pay and the complaints from employees about working conditions.“We regularly see shelves that are stocked in a disorganized manner,” said Brad Thomas, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets. “As a retail analyst that indicates that the store doesn’t have enough labor or the right labor.”Mr. Mushkin of R5 Capital said other major retailers had responded faster to the changing labor conditions by raising wages when their sales were booming last year. Those early moves resulted in a smaller hit to their bottom line than what the dollar stores are experiencing.“We provide our associates with flexible schedules and market-competitive pay, and in all cases, we are at or above minimum wage in the markets we operate in,” Dollar Tree said in a statement.Political attitudes toward dollar stores in some communities are also shifting. Since the start of the pandemic, nearly three dozen communities have passed limits on dollar store developments or rejected stores outright, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.The dollar stores say those are the exceptions. “We are always disappointed when local lawmakers choose to limit our ability to serve their community, but these relatively few situations have not materially impaired our ability to grow,” Dollar General said.The company added, “We provide our customers with convenient access to essential items and quality brands they want and need, including components of a nutritious meal,” including fresh produce, which is being offered in an increasing number of stores.Although the opposition hardly makes a dent in the more than 1,620 dollar stores slated to open this year, some measures have happened in major markets such as the Atlanta area and Cleveland, and in small towns like Warrensburg, N.Y.There has been considerable opposition on Warrensburg’s governing board to a Dollar General that was proposed to be built on Main Street.Bryan Rounds, a member of the board, said Warrensburg, in the southern Adirondacks, had long been mostly a “drive-through town” on the road to lakeside camps or ski slopes farther north. But during the pandemic, Warrensburg, like many rural areas, became a popular spot for Airbnb rentals. “Things are happening around here,” Mr. Rounds said. “We don’t need one of these stores.” More

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    The Pandemic Changed How We Spent Our Time

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    A lonely year Average time spent per day during waking hours, May through December in 2020 vs. 2019 No time 2 hours 4 hours 6 hours 8 hours Alone +57 min. With household members only +31 min. With people outside household –1 hour and 33 min. 2019 2020 Note: Excludes time spent on personal grooming […] More