Showing posts with label Jobs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jobs. Show all posts

Friday, February 3, 2023

U.S. Added 517,000 Jobs as Hiring Accelerated in January

Well, that recession everyone's been predicting hasn't materialized. This economy is sizzling, *despite* the loathed Biden administration's efforts to throttle it.

At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. added 517,000 jobs in January, snapping five-month string of slowing employment growth":

The U.S. labor market accelerated at the start of the year as broad-based hiring added a robust 517,000 jobs and pushed the unemployment rate to a 53-year low.

January’s payroll gains were the largest since July 2022 and snapped a string of five straight months of slowing employment growth, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate was 3.4% last month, its lowest level since May 1969.

Wage growth continued to soften last month, despite the strong job gains. Average hourly earnings grew 4.4% in January from a year earlier, down from a revised 4.8% in December. Annual revisions to employment and pay data suggest that wage growth has been cooling—but at a slower pace than previously thought.

The average workweek rose to 34.7 hours, the highest since March 2022.

“This is just incredibly, surprisingly strong,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide. “Not only are you hiring more workers but the workers you have overall are working more hours. It doesn’t really get stronger than that.”

The hiring gain was well above economists’ expectations. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal had expected 187,000 new jobs last month.

The report likely keeps the Federal Reserve on track to raise interest rates by another quarter-percentage point at its meeting next month and to signal another increase is likely after that. The central bank raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point this week to a range between 4.5% and 4.75%.

The Fed is trying to keep the economy growing at a slower-than-average pace to weaken demand and cool inflation. But the report Friday suggested the labor market had been even more resilient in recent months than recently reported, with the growth in average hour earnings and payrolls revised higher at the end of last year.

Stocks fell and bond yields climbed following the jobs report.

Payrolls grew in a range of sectors, including leisure and hospitality, professional and business services and healthcare. The hiring surge contrasted against high-profile corporate layoff announcements, particularly by tech companies that have cut back amid economic uncertainty...

 

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Monday, August 22, 2022

'Quiet Quitting'? This Is Not Good

Young people are generally inclined towards slacking anyways, but post-lockdown/pandemic, the lackadaisical sloth cohort is downright indolent. 

At the Wall Street Journal, "If Your Co-Workers Are ‘Quiet Quitting,’ Here’s What That Means":

Not taking your job too seriously has a new name: quiet quitting.

The phrase is generating millions of views on TikTok as some young professionals reject the idea of going above and beyond in their careers, labeling their lesser enthusiasm a form of “quitting.” It isn’t about getting off the company payroll, these employees say. In fact, the idea is to stay on it—but focus your time on the things you do outside of the office.

The videos range from sincere ruminations on work-life balance to snarky jokes. Some set firm boundaries against overtime in favor of family. Others advocate coasting from 9-to-5, doing just enough to get by. Many want to untether their careers from their identities.

Of course, every generation enters the workforce and quickly realizes that having a job isn’t all fun and games. Navigating contemptible bosses and the petty indignities that have always been inflicted on the ranks of working stiffs has never been easy. And many people who say, when they’re young, that they don’t care about climbing the corporate ladder end up changing their minds.

The difference now is that this group has TikTok and hashtags to emote. And these 20-somethings joined the working world during the Covid-19 pandemic, with all of its dislocating effects, including blurred boundaries between work and life. Many workers say they feel they have power to push back in the current strong labor market. Recent data from Gallup shows employee engagement is declining.

Clayton Farris, 41 years old, said that when he recently heard about the new term circulating on social media he realized he’d already been doing it by refusing to let work worries rule over him the way they used to.

“The most interesting part about it is nothing’s changed,” he said in his TikTok video. “I still work just as hard. I still get just as much accomplished. I just don’t stress and internally rip myself to shreds.”

Across generations, U.S. employee engagement is falling, according to survey data from Gallup, but Gen Z and younger millennials, born in 1989 and after, reported the lowest engagement of all during the first quarter at 31%.

Jim Harter, chief scientist for Gallup’s workplace and well-being research, said workers’ descriptions of “quiet quitting” align with a large group of survey respondents that he classifies as “not engaged”—those who will show up to work and do the minimum required but not much else. More than half of workers surveyed by Gallup who were born after 1989—54%—fall into this category.

One factor Gallup uses to measure engagement is whether people feel their work has purpose. Younger employees report that they don’t feel that way, the data show. These are the people who are more likely to work passively and look out for themselves over their employers, Dr. Harter said.

Paige West, 24, said she stopped overextending herself at a former position as a transportation analyst in Washington, D.C., less than a year into the job. Work stress had gotten so intense that, she said, her hair was falling out and she couldn’t sleep. While looking for a new role, she no longer worked beyond 40 hours each week, didn’t sign up for extra training and stopped trying to socialize with colleagues.

“I took a step back and said, ‘I’m just going to work the hours I’m supposed to work, that I’m really getting paid to work,’” she said. “Besides that, I’m not going to go extra.”

Ms. West said that she found herself more engaged during meetings once she stopped trying so hard, and she received more positive feedback. She left the job last year and is now a full-time freelance virtual assistant making about 75% of her previous salary. She adjusted by moving back to her home state of Florida.

Zaid Khan, a 24-year-old engineer in New York, posted a quiet quitting video that has racked up three million views in two weeks. In his viral TikTok, Mr. Khan explained the concept this way: “You’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond.”

“You’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life,” he said.

Mr. Khan says he and many of his peers reject the idea that productivity trumps all; they don’t see the payoff.

Some online commenters pledged to relax on social media when they had downtime at work. Others say they will follow their job descriptions to the letter, instead of asking for additional assignments.

A new crop of quiet-quitting videos is starting to pop up, denouncing the move as a cop-out, not a cure-all for burnout or discontentment at work.

People who coast have been fixtures of the office for decades, but many of today’s less-invested employees have been able to skate by thanks to remote work, said Elise Freedman, a senior client partner at consulting firm Korn Ferry.

If the economy sours, Ms. Freedman said, less-engaged workers may be more at risk of layoffs. “It’s perfectly appropriate that we expect our employees to give their all,” she said...

Workers showing up and doing the *absolute* minimum fucks up everyone else on the job. Lowering stress is fine, but if people are just skating all day for a paycheck, being personal totally checked out and completely disengaged from their required tasks, that's no good.

My son notes, on top of that, there's not enough workers on the job in the first place. Nobody wants to work anymore, or barely so. Employers can't find enough employees. Those who do want to do well have no support and end up schlupping extra hard for the same base pay. 

Fuck this youth generation. We're doomed.


Monday, April 18, 2022

Americans Are Over the Pandemic, Despite the ("Coming") Omicron 2 Wave

I'm over it, but I went to the Book Barn the other day, and the store heavily "recommended" masks and all staff members were masked-up to the hilt. I felt like it was April 2020.

And mind you, this included young people, including a woman at the sales counter who looked like a college student (and thus at extremely low risk of infection).

One good thing I'm noticing is fewer and fewer workers at restaurants --- especially hosts and servers --- are wearing masks. I think things are getting back to normal, and if Democrat states continue mask mandates --- or reimpose them over the summer, when the new "wave" is supposedly expected --- they'll be toying with political death.

At the Wall Street Journal, "BA.2 Proves the Pandemic Isn’t Over, but People Are Over It":

Two years of dealing with Covid-19 have made people tired of taking precautions, getting tested and asking about other people’s status.

BA.2 is spreading in the U.S., although few want to talk about it.

The Omicron subvariant is contributing to school and work absences, yet two years of dealing with Covid-19 have made people tired of taking precautions, getting tested and asking about other people’s status, say physicians, psychologists and behavioral scientists.

If this is a pandemic wave, then many have decided the best response is a weary shrug.

Part of that reaction comes from the fact that while cases are ticking up in some areas, hospitalizations remain low. Research has so far shown most people who are up-to-date with Covid-19 vaccines face little risk of landing in the hospital with BA.2, and prior infection with another variant also bolsters the body’s defenses.

In addition, people in many places got on with their lives long ago and are unwilling to return to a pandemic crouch.

Psychologists say it can be difficult to discern how seriously to take BA.2, given shifting guidance and sometimes difficult-to-parse public-health messaging. That anxiety and uncertainty can result in avoidance, says Dr. Bethany Teachman, a psychologist and director of clinical training at the University of Virginia. Avoidance takes various forms, she says, including refraining from asking friends about Covid exposures to avoid answers people may not want to hear.

Some people say they won’t worry about BA.2 unless it is absolutely clear they need to. Nearly three-quarters of Americans polled by Monmouth University in mid-March agreed that Covid is here to stay, and people should get on with their lives.

Kristin Green, 55 years old, a high-school English teacher in Orange County, N.Y., says when she heard about the BA.2 variant, it felt like the wind was sucked out of her.

“It was like, oh, not again. Come on. We’re finally out together, seeing each other, and I don’t want to have to go back to that,” says Ms. Green. She hopes not to have to don her mask during the school day again.

“If they require it at work, obviously, I will,” she says. “Otherwise, no.”

Some patients are opting out of testing to avoid the financial and social implications of testing positive and missing work or long-awaited travel and events, says Shantanu Nundy, a primary-care physician and chief medical officer at digital healthcare firm Accolade. And some patients who do test positive for Covid-19 don’t want to keep testing until they get a negative result.

“I got a lot of those phone calls when people say, ‘Hey, I’m having a weird cough. It’s probably allergies, right?’ or ‘I’m positive, but it’s been four days and I really don’t have any symptoms. Like I’m sure I’m fine to go on XYZ trip,” he says.

Figures from the Department of Health and Human Services show testing peaked at 7.74 tests per 1,000 people on Jan. 9 and has since declined to 1.91 tests per 1,000 people, according to an analysis from researchers at the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data. These data only account for PCR tests, said researchers, which are lab-reported and easier to track than at-home rapid tests, which have boomed in popularity.

The shift to home testing along with shutdowns in testing sites have made public-health experts concerned that official case tallies are a significant undercount. Natasha Bhuyan, a family physician at One Medical in Phoenix, says some of her patients are unaware how prevalent the virus remains and are surprised when they test positive.

“They come in and they’re like, ‘I think my allergies are acting up, or I have a headache, I’m dehydrated, or I probably have a stomach bug,’ and when I suggest getting a Covid test, people are like, ‘Oh, I don’t think I have Covid,’” says Dr. Bhuyan.

People who do test positive are often confused about whom they should tell and what they should do, as contact-tracing efforts have faded and mandatory precautions have dropped.

When Zach Ruh, 26, a treasury analyst for a tech company in New York City, woke up more fatigued than usual late last month, he chalked it up to jet lag from a recent skiing trip to New Mexico. He happened to pass a pop-up testing site on a grocery-shopping excursion several days later and decided to take a PCR just in case, he says. Two days later, he received a surprising text: He had tested positive...

 

Saturday, April 16, 2022

Several Million U.S. Workers Seen Staying Out of Labor Force Indefinitely

Well that's no good, sheesh.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Survey shows many labor-force dropouts plan to maintain social distancing after pandemic, raising implications for economy":

Several million workers who dropped out of the U.S. workforce during the Covid-19 pandemic plan to stay out indefinitely because of persistent illness fears or physical impairments, potentially exacerbating the labor shortage for years, new research shows.

About three million workforce dropouts say they don’t plan to return to pre-Covid activities—whether that includes going to work, shopping in person or dining out—even after the pandemic ends, according to a monthly survey conducted over the past year by a team of researchers. The workforce dropouts tend to be women, lack a college degree and have worked in low-paying fields.

The research team has named this phenomenon “long social distancing” and believes it will be one of the lasting scars of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Our evidence is the labor force isn’t going to magically bounce back,” said Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who oversees the survey along with José María Barrero of Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and Steven J. Davis of the University of Chicago. “We still don’t see any change in these long social distancing numbers, which suggests this drop in labor-force participation may be quite enduring.”

Should the researchers’ predictions turn out to be true—that the labor force will be depressed for potentially years after the pandemic recedes—the implications for the world’s largest economy and the Federal Reserve are substantial. A sharp drop in the labor force at the pandemic’s start led to shortages of workers and products that have frustrated households, restrained economic growth and helped push inflation to a 40-year high.

The labor force has recovered significant ground since March and April 2020, when the pandemic put about 22 million people out of work and the labor force—consisting of both employed workers and job seekers age 16 or older—fell by 8.2 million workers, or 5%.

The ranks of employed workers as of this March were 1.2 million shy of their prepandemic level, recovering faster than economists predicted two years ago. The labor force grew to 164.4 million workers, down just 174,000 from its prepandemic level. The rebound has been particularly sharp in recent months as the winter outbreak of the Omicron variant of Covid-19 faded.

Even with those gains, the U.S. is still missing about 3.5 million workers, by the team’s calculations. That figure represents the difference between the number of workers in March and how many there would be if the labor force had continued to grow at the pace it did from 2015 to 2019, absent the pandemic.

And their research suggests progress could soon stall. If so, the labor force would remain depressed for longer than the Fed anticipates, potentially helping to keep inflation high.

Chuck Lage, 63 years old, is among those who lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic in spring 2020. The Landenberg, Pa., resident was laid off from his position as a director of business planning for a nonprofit professional association.

Mr. Lage has common variable immunodeficiency, or CVID, a genetic condition that prevents his body from producing antibodies to fight illnesses. Worried about getting sick, he retired early and has avoided almost all of his prepandemic activities such as going out to eat and socializing. He plans to continue doing so for the foreseeable future.

Through a Facebook group for people with his condition, he learned that there are many people like him. One recent member posted a picture of a zebra—an animal that people with CVID have adopted as a sort of mascot—sitting in a car looking out the window.

“The world is moving on,” Mr. Lage said. “We’re not able to yet.”

The fate of people such as Mr. Lage is at the heart of one of the economy’s biggest puzzles: whether certain adults will re-enter the labor market as the pandemic fades. Employers have struggled to find workers to meet strong consumer demand and have bid up workers’ wages as a result, one of several factors that pushed inflation to a four-decade high of 8.5% in March.

For each month over the past year, the team has anonymously surveyed 5,000 people—not always the same ones—age 20 to 64 who earned at least $10,000 in the prior year. The survey asked whether they plan a full, partial or no return to normal activities after the pandemic. Consistently, 1 in 10 have said they plan no return. In the early months of this year, when the Omicron variant was surging, that share rose to 13%.

After controlling for work status—some of those people were working remotely—and other variables such as age and gender, the team concluded that roughly three million people are staying out of the workforce to remain socially distant. The team didn’t ask health details such as whether those people have “long Covid,” to avoid health-privacy concerns.

Other data suggest that fear of Covid remains an issue for some workers but has fallen from higher levels earlier in the pandemic.

The Census Bureau has surveyed adults throughout the pandemic, asking among other questions whether they didn’t work in the past week because they were afraid of getting Covid or spreading it.

That figure peaked at above six million early in the pandemic, fell sharply a year ago after vaccines became widely available and remained around three million for much of 2021. In mid-March 2022, the figure fell to 2.3 million from three million in February....

 Very sad, actually.


Friday, July 16, 2021

Many Jobs Lost During Pandemic Are Gone for Good

No surprise here.

At WSJ, "Many Jobs Lost During the Coronavirus Pandemic Just Aren’t Coming Back":

Job openings are at a record high, leaving the impression that employers are hiring like never before. But many businesses that laid off workers during the pandemic are already predicting they will need fewer employees in the future.

As with past economic shocks, the pandemic-induced recession was a catalyst for employers to invest in automation and implement other changes designed to curb hiring. In industries ranging from hotels to aerospace to restaurants, businesses have reviewed their operations and discovered ways to save on labor costs for the long term.

Economic data show that companies have learned to do more with less over the last 16 months or so. Output nearly recovered to pre-pandemic levels in the first quarter of 2021—down just 0.5% from the end of 2019—even though U.S. workers put in 4.3% fewer hours than they did before the health crisis.

“When demand falls, it’s a natural time to retool or invest because you won’t lose customers or sales while you tinker and shut things down,” said Brad Hershbein, senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. “You don’t want to interrupt business when it’s at its peak.”

The changes will require many workers to adapt. Though the job market is strong right now for highly paid professionals and low-wage service workers alike, not everyone can find a match for their skills, experience or location, creating a paradox of relatively high unemployment combined with record job openings. Economists said it can be a prolonged process for some laid-off workers to find jobs or acquire the skills needed for new careers...

Still more.

And at WaPo, "Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends":

Millions of jobs that have been shortchanged or wiped out entirely by the coronavirus pandemic are unlikely to come back, economists warn, setting up a massive need for career changes and retraining in the United States.

The coronavirus pandemic has triggered permanent shifts in how and where people work. Businesses are planning for a future where more people are working from home, traveling less for business, or replacing workers with robots. All of these modifications mean many workers will not be able to do the same job they did before the pandemic, even after much of the U.S. population gets vaccinated against the deadly virus.

Microsoft founder-turned-philanthropist Bill Gates raised eyebrows in November when he predicted that half of business travel and 30 percent of “days in the office” would go away forever. That forecast no longer seems far-fetched. In a report coming out later this week that was previewed to The Washington Post, the McKinsey Global Institute says that 20 percent of business travel won’t come back and about 20 percent of workers could end up working from home indefinitely. These shifts mean fewer jobs at hotels, restaurants and downtown shops, in addition to ongoing automation of office support roles and some factory jobs.

“We’re recovering, but to a different economy,” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said in November.

The nation’s unemployed are starting to react to these big shifts. Two-thirds of the jobless say they have seriously considered changing their occupation or field of work, according to the Pew Research Center. That is a significant increase from the Great Recession era, when 52 percent said they were considering such a change.

“We think that there is a very real scenario in which a lot of the large employment, low-wage jobs in retail and in food service just go away in the coming years,” said Susan Lund, head of the McKinsey Global Institute. “It means that we’re going to need a lot more short-term training and credentialing programs.”

One problem for many unemployed people is they lack the money to retrain. This crisis has put many out of work for nearly a year, and the financial support from unemployment and food stamps is often not sufficient to pay their bills. The stimulus legislation being debated in Congress does not include any money for retraining.

“Trying to figure out what to do six months from now is hard when you are trying to make ends meet and you don’t have enough food,” said Brad Hershbein, who helps design and study retraining programs as a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research...

As the say, capitalism is creative destruction.

More here.

 

Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Katie Pavlich Hammers Biden Administration's 'Job Killing' Minimum Wage Plan (VIDEO)

Well, it's not just the minimum wage, of course. 

Practically every "executive order" the new president has signed is designed to destroy some group that voted for Trump in November. Jobs? Schmobs? The Democrats don't give a crap about creating jobs. They care about the hardline leftist agenda being pushed out by the weak and feeble new president's freakin' job-destroy anti-capitalist handlers. 



Friday, February 5, 2021

The 'Primal Scream' of Working Moms Trying to Handle At-Home Teaching Amid the Pandemic

 At NYT (with the usual disclaimers), "“I wish I had the energy to scream. All my energy just goes into getting through every day, until I can go to sleep. I have three kids, all in virtual schools since March, and work full time. And it just feels like failing, every day, at everything I do. And I just want to change, want to be by myself for one minute. I don’t know how to keep doing this. But there isn’t really another option”:

“I cannot remember the last time I did not worry, I did not spend my day worrying about so much stuff. Every day is something different. I just want to wake up and go through my day and not worry, and not wonder, and not know what the future holds. Because this right here sucks. And I’m sick of it. I’m so sick of this.”

“There is just so much talking. Talking all the time. All day long. Words. Words. Words. So much talking. I just, I need no more talking. No more words. I need no more. No more. So much talking. I just need silence. Please. Silence.”

“I love my kids. I love my family. But we are together all of the time. Like, I never appreciated teachers and school as much as I did now. I don’t want to be my child’s teacher. I am not doing good with this. But, all things considered, things are cool. Somebody else rear my children, please. I miss going out. I miss being drunk. I miss dancing.”


Saturday, March 9, 2019

Workers Suddenly Have More Power

At WaPo, the Trump economy is helping the working class proletariat lol.



Monday, September 3, 2018

Expect Big Economic Lift-Off from President Trump's 'Space Force' (VIDEO)

Hey, leftists even like Trump's plan for a "space force."

And while we're at it, perhaps we could launch a few members of the anti-Trump "resistance" into outer space. They'd be good target practice for the all-American intergalactic Air Force, lol.




At LAT, "Trump's 'space force' could propel Southern California's aerospace industry":
One of the big winners from President Trump’s push for a new military service called “space force” may be one of his least favorite places — California.

Once the launchpad of the nation’s aerospace industry, Southern California stands to see a surge in government and industry jobs and billions of dollars in contracts for satellites and other technology if Congress approves the space force when it takes up the proposal next year, industry experts and former military officials said.

“You can’t just go out in the middle of Iowa and try to create a center for space,” said Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance), a retired Air Force officer. “So Southern California is very well situated” to get substantial benefits.

The extent of the benefits would depend on where the headquarters is located, how much is spent on new satellites and other space systems, and how many people and programs now in the Air Force and other existing armed services might be shifted to the new force.

Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis said Tuesday that planners have just begun preparing cost estimates. “We’ve already commenced the effort, but I don’t want to give you an off-the-cuff number,” Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon.

The biggest uncertainty is whether Trump or Congress would try to direct the rewards to other states. The president has visited California only once since taking office, and his administration has warred with Sacramento on fuel efficiency standards, clean air regulations, firefighting techniques and more.

“Southern California remains the largest concentration of space technology, including military space technology, in the United States,” said Loren Thompson, aerospace analyst with the Lexington Institute think tank, which receives money from major industry players, including Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp.

“But when you set up a new military service, you increase the impact of politics in ways that might not necessarily be good for California,” he added.

Colorado and Florida, which also boast extensive civilian and military aerospace facilities, could be big winners too.

The White House says it will unveil its plan for a space force early next year. For now, the Pentagon is taking interim steps, including creation of a Space Command in the Air Force to centralize planning for war fighting in space.

Congressional approval of Trump’s idea for a futuristic armed force for space is by no means certain. Key lawmakers, some Pentagon officials and senior commanders, especially in the Air Force, fear losing responsibility and budgetary authority for space...
More.

Monday, April 9, 2018

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Minority Unemployment at the Lowest Levels on Record

If voters truly vote their pocketbook, then President Trump should be a shoo-in for reelection in 2020. Alas, I doubt the economic models of elections have much predictive power in this age of political tribalism.

This is good news either way.

At IBD, "Don't Look Now, But Minority Unemployment is at Record Lows Under Trump."

Sunday, June 11, 2017

New Coal Mine Opens in Pennsylvania

From Fox News Insider, via Paul Joseph Watson, on Twitter: