Brunswick Business Daily

BRUNSWICK BUSINESS DAILY
News That Affects Your Business

Labor and Jobs

How to Get Back Into the Job Market

by

The transition to, and acceptance of, remote work has enabled employers to cast a wider net when they search for talent — and so should you, in looking for jobs.

“Many employers are open to hiring remote workers, but often in the same time zone,” Ms. Weitzman said. “That means if you live on the East Coast, you’ll have multiple options in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Connecticut.” Sure, this means you’re competing with a bigger pool of candidates, but it also gives you more chances to find the right fit.

This could also be a good time to make a career transition. “You might want to be more flexible and think about switching fields,” Mr. Wahlquist said. “Take those skills that you’ve developed and try to find something that is even better, or more sustainable long term.”

Meanwhile, consider taking a relevant training course, especially if you’ve been unemployed. “If you’re not working, I would 100-percent recommend to sign up for some training, because it shows initiative and a vested interest in updating and expanding your skill set,” Ms. Weitzman said.

If you’ve been out of a job for a while, either for lack of opportunities or because you were busy shepherding children through Zoom school, that’s OK. “Everybody knows what happened this past year,” Mr. Wahlquist said. “Most people have a big free pass for a gap in their work history during the pandemic.”

Still, you should be prepared to explain — succinctly — what happened and what you’ve been doing since. “Even if your past job loss wasn’t entirely due to Covid, most employers want to start a relationship with transparency,” he said.

And, potential employers will want to check up on your references. Expect that they’ll want to talk to your former supervisors for the past five years, or past couple of jobs. “Take this time to go back to those people and be direct,” Mr. Wahlquist. “You can ask, ‘Will you be willing to give a reference, and able to give me a good reference?’” A question that your former supervisor might be asked is if he or she would rehire you. “And if the answer is no, then why?”

View Original Source

Get Back In The Job Market

by

The transition to, and acceptance of, remote work has enabled employers to cast a wider net when they search for talent — and so should you, in looking for jobs.

“Many employers are open to hiring remote workers, but often in the same time zone,” Ms. Weitzman said. “That means if you live on the East Coast, you’ll have multiple options in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Connecticut.” Sure, this means you’re competing with a bigger pool of candidates, but it also gives you more chances to find the right fit.

This could also be a good time to make a career transition. “You might want to be more flexible and think about switching fields,” Mr. Wahlquist said. “Take those skills that you’ve developed and try to find something that is even better, or more sustainable long term.”

Meanwhile, consider taking a relevant training course, especially if you’ve been unemployed. “If you’re not working, I would 100-percent recommend to sign up for some training, because it shows initiative and a vested interest in updating and expanding your skill set,” Ms. Weitzman said.

If you’ve been out of a job for a while, either for lack of opportunities or because you were busy shepherding children through Zoom school, that’s OK. “Everybody knows what happened this past year,” Mr. Wahlquist said. “Most people have a big free pass for a gap in their work history during the pandemic.”

Still, you should be prepared to explain — succinctly — what happened and what you’ve been doing since. “Even if your past job loss wasn’t entirely due to Covid, most employers want to start a relationship with transparency,” he said.

And, potential employers will want to check up on your references. Expect that they’ll want to talk to your former supervisors for the past five years, or past couple of jobs. “Take this time to go back to those people and be direct,” Mr. Wahlquist. “You can ask, ‘Will you be willing to give a reference, and able to give me a good reference?’” A question that your former supervisor might be asked is if he or she would rehire you. “And if the answer is no, then why?”

View Original Source

How to Design a Hybrid Workplace

by

The DealBook newsletter delves into a single topic or theme every weekend, providing reporting and analysis that offers a better understanding of an important issue in the news. If you don’t already receive the daily newsletter, sign up here.

As companies reopen their offices, they are deciding how the virtual work arrangements they’ve relied on during the pandemic will factor into their long-term plans — or not.

Google’s “flexible workweek” calls for employees to spend at least three days a week in the office and the rest at home. Microsoft’s “hybrid workplace” means most employees can spend up to half their time working remotely. Ford Motor’s “flexible hybrid work model” leaves it up to workers and their managers to decide how much time they need to spend in the office.

Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase don’t have names for their postpandemic policies, because they expect most employees to return to the office for most of the time. Goldman’s C.E.O., David Solomon, called working from home an “aberration,” and JPMorgan’s chief, Jamie Dimon, said it had “serious weaknesses.”

But many companies have hatched a postpandemic plan in which employees return to the office for some of the time while mixing in more work from home than before. The appeal of this compromise is clear: Employers hope to give employees the flexibility and focus that come from working at home without sacrificing the in-person connections of the office.

How, exactly, to strike this balance can be less obvious.

Should companies require employees to be in the office on certain days? For a set number of days each week? How should those in the office accommodate colleagues working remotely?

To help answer pressing questions like these, DealBook assembled advice from experts about where to start, how to avoid common pitfalls, and the most important things to consider when not everyone is working in the same place.

By Robert C. Pozen and Alexandra Samuel

Mr. Pozen, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, and Ms. Samuel, a technology researcher, are the authors of “Remote, Inc.: How to Thrive at Work … Wherever You Are.”

A review of the research on virtual teams comes up short on universal best practices for designing a hybrid office. But it does suggest certain factors that companies should focus on. We call these five factors FLOCS: function, location, organization, culture and schedule.

  • What is the function of each team member? A team that spends many hours on brainstorming or collaborative tasks needs more time at the workplace. By contrast, teams that do a lot of deep, focused work benefit from the relative quiet of home.

  • What is the location of each team member? Hiring in a single metropolitan area means you can join your teammates in a nearby office or meet up easily for one-on-one meetings. Conversely, there’s no point in making employees report to the nearest office if everyone they work with is in another city.

  • What is the structure of the organization? In a comparison of two accounting companies, researchers found that a flatter hierarchy helped facilitate virtual work, because remote workers didn’t feel too far from the center of the organization. Our own research also found a strong correlation between employee autonomy and productivity outside the office.

  • What is the culture of the company? Companies with an individualistic culture seem to make a smoother transition to virtual work; by contrast, companies that stress “us” over “me” have been slower to adopt online collaboration.

  • What is each team’s schedule? If schedules are similar and work is interdependent, it’s good to encourage everyone to work roughly at the same time. If employees live in different time zones, it’s better to set a few common windows for real-time communications like videoconferences, and let most other work unfold through email or document sharing.

These factors make it easier for managers to address the most common challenges faced by hybrid teams. Take communication barriers: What if half the team is in the office and the other half is dialing in from home? If their locations are dispersed (so the Zoom callers can’t make it into the office) and the organization is flat and decentralized, the company could use a buddy system to make each person in the room responsible for keeping one particular Zoom caller fully in the conversation. If the caller misses something, the in-room buddy can fill in that person via text chat; if the caller is being talked over, the in-room buddy can step in to ensure that the person is heard.

Another common dilemma is deciding exactly who will be in the office on which days. This is further complicated by a significant gap between executive and employee perspectives, with most executives feeling that company culture depends on people spending at least three days a week in the office and most employees saying they want to spend at least three days a week working remotely.

The answer begins with function: Who needs to work closely together to do jobs effectively? These people should spend the most time together. If their locations are close and the team is largely on the same schedule, interdependent team members can go to the office on the same two or three days a week, for the same set of hours. That also opens the door to significant savings on real estate by rotating different teams through the same space.

Similarly, this lens can deal with a typical problem among mostly remote employees: feeling second class, especially if other employees choose to be in the office every day. If employees will rarely be in the office because of location, and an organization is hierarchical in a way that emphasizes climbing the ladder, they may feel left out and worry that they’ll miss out on promotions. A team manager can help them by encouraging a schedule that lines up with the rest of the team and addressing cultural biases that exclude particular groups by going directly to remote employees with the latest news and job openings.

There is no single right way to design a hybrid workplace. But asking the right questions can help each team shape what we call the Goldilocks plan — with not too much or too little remote work.

By Nicholas Bloom

Mr. Bloom is a professor of economics at Stanford University.

In monthly surveys about remote work that my research team has conducted since May, we’ve found that 30 percent of U.S. employees never want to return to working in the office, while 25 percent never want to spend another day working from home. Given such different views, it seems natural to let the workers choose. One manager told me: “I treat my team like adults. They get to decide when and where they work as long as they get their jobs done.”

But this approach raises two concerns. One is that it’s likely to result in “mixed mode,” the widely disliked situation when some people are at home and others are at the office, all appearing in one Zoom box in the conference room.

The second, less obvious concern is the risk to diversity. It turns out that who wants to work from home after the pandemic is not random. In our research we found that among college graduates with young children, women want to work from home full time almost 50 percent more often than men do.

This is problematic given evidence that working from home while your colleagues are in the office can hurt your chance of promotion. In a study I ran in China at a large multinational company, we randomly assigned volunteers to work remotely or remain in the office. Remote employees had a 50 percent lower rate of promotion after 21 months than their colleagues in the office.

Adding this up, you can see how the let-them-choose approach could lead to a diversity crisis: Single young men who generally opt to go into the office five days a week could rocket up the firm while employees with young children, particularly women, prefer to work from home and are held back.

Remote work can be a huge benefit for firms and employees, but should be centrally organized so everyone within the same team is in the office on the same days. This is how working from home will work out.

To better understand how teams can best work together online and in person, the Harvard researchers Ashley Whillans, Leslie Perlow and Aurora Turek interviewed employees at a consulting firm as it adapted to remote work during the pandemic. The researchers used what they learned to define categories of team interactions, which companies can consider when deciding how to structure work — regardless of where it happens.

Content interactions: communication about tasks, such as sharing feedback while sitting side by side. When work went virtual, more of these interactions took place asynchronously, through digital work tools such as Slack. One manager said communication had improved because individuals had more time to think.

Bounce interactions: new idea generation, as with an impromptu whiteboard brainstorming session. In the virtual version, individuals often generated ideas on their own, and then they and others emailed them back and forth. That made it harder to align with others; some teams adjusted by moving brainstorming sessions to videoconferences.

Process interactions: defining and structuring work, such as check-in meetings. Without an option to drop by a colleague’s desk to ask a casual question, teams felt there should be more process conversations, but also that these chats could be exhausting. Some teams moved away from using video meetings to less-demanding communication tools like Slack.

Social interactions: getting to know one another, such as sharing meals when traveling together. Some teams experimented with virtual happy hours or dinners, but not everyone was interested in taking personal time to participate, and many saw these virtual events as less effective than in-person outings.

Huddle interactions: informal exchanges, like those that take place in a hallway between meetings or over coffee. These largely went away in the virtual environment, and managers became the primary conduit of all information. Some teams began scheduling time for informal conversations about work, such as sending a Google invite to debrief after a meeting.

Development interactions: mentorship and development feedback. While weekly meetings continued in the virtual workplace, informal feedback conversations stopped. One person suggested “sideways” feedback meetings, where all participants, regardless of position, give feedback to one another.

Ms. Perlow, one of the researchers leading the study, told DealBook that considering these categories while managing partly remote teams can “shine a light on the different aspects of teamwork that we need to make sure we’re solving for.”

“We used to be co-located, and that was one beast. Now we have 100 percent virtual, and that’s one beast. Hybrid is going to be its own beast,” Ms. Perlow said. “It’s not going to be just a little bit of each. It’s going to have its own core issues.”

What do you think? What’s the ideal mix between remote and office work? What’s lost when people work less in the office? What’s gained when they work more from home? Let us know: dealbook@nytimes.com.

View Original Source

Once Crippled by the Pandemic, Airlines See a Fast Recovery Coming

by

The worst appears to be over for airlines. Now, it’s just a matter of waiting for the summer travel frenzy to begin.

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines on Thursday were the last two major U.S. airlines to report financial results for the first three months of the year. American lost nearly $1.3 billion, while Southwest earned $116 million, a welcome profit after weathering its first annual loss in half a century last year.

“While the pandemic is not over, we believe the worst is behind us, in terms of the severity of the negative impact on travel demand,” Gary Kelly, Southwest’s chairman, said in a statement. “Vaccinations are on the rise, and Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States are down significantly from their peak in January 2021. As a result, we are experiencing steady weekly improvements in domestic leisure bookings, which began in mid-February 2021.”

That sentiment is shared across the industry.

“With the momentum underway from the first quarter, we see signs of continued recovery in demand,” Doug Parker, American’s chief executive, said in a statement on Thursday. His counterpart at United Airlines issued a similarly hopeful statement this week, despite posting a loss of $1.4 billion. Last week, Delta Air Lines reported a $1.2 billion loss.

The industry has been buoyed by federal support, receiving $54 billion in grants to pay workers over the past year and another $25 billion in loans. Mr. Kelly of Southwest credited that support for the airline’s slight profit, saying that the airline would have lost $1 billion in the first quarter without it.

Southwest was also buoyed by its limited exposure to corporate and international travel, which have been slow to rebound and are lucrative parts of the business for American, Delta and United. Leisure travel within the United States, which all of the airlines serve, is almost fully recovered.

Air travel started to recover meaningfully in early March, with Transportation Security Administration data showing a steady rise in the number of people screened at airport security checkpoints relative to the same period in 2019. That surge has subsided somewhat since earlier this month, with screenings down about 42 percent over the past week compared with 2019.

Southwest said demand for travel continues to improve with summer fast approaching and customers once again feeling comfortable making travel plans further out. The airline estimates that it has about 35 percent of expected bookings in place for June and 20 percent for July.

View Original Source

Welcome to the YOLO Economy

by

In addition to the job-hopping you’d expect during boom times, the pandemic has created many more remote jobs, and expanded the number of companies willing to hire outside of big, coastal cities. That has given workers in remote-friendly industries, such as tech and finance, more leverage to ask for what they want.

“Employees have a totally unprecedented ability to negotiate in the next 18 to 48 months,” said Johnathan Nightingale, an author and a co-founder of Raw Signal Group, a management training firm. “If I, as an individual, am dissatisfied with the current state of my employment, I have so many more options than I used to have.”

Individual YOLO decisions can be chalked up to many factors: cabin fever, low interest rates, the emergence of new get-rich-quick schemes like NFTs and meme stocks. But many seem related to a deeper, generational disillusionment, and a feeling that the economy is changing in ways that reward the crazy and punish the cautious.

Several people in their late 20s and early 30s — mostly those who went to good schools, work in high-prestige industries and would never be classified as “essential workers” — told me that the pandemic had destroyed their faith in the traditional white-collar career path. They had watched their independent-minded peers getting rich by joining start-ups or gambling on cryptocurrencies. Meanwhile, their bosses were drowning them in mundane work, or trying to automate their jobs, and were generally failing to support them during one of the hardest years of their lives.

“The past year has been telling for how companies really value their work forces,” said Latesha Byrd, a career coach in Charlotte, N.C. “It has become challenging to continue to work for companies who operate business as usual, without taking into account how our lives have changed overnight.”

Ms. Byrd, who primarily coaches women of color in fields like tech, finance and media, said that in addition to suffering from pandemic-related burnout, many minority employees felt disillusioned with their employers’ shallow commitments to racial justice.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are extremely important now,” she said. “Employees want to know, ‘Is this company going to support me?’”

View Original Source

Why Amazon Workers Sided With the Company Over a Union

by

When Graham Brooks received his ballot in early February, asking whether he wanted to form a union at the Amazon warehouse in Alabama where he works, he did not hesitate. He marked the NO box, and mailed the ballot in.

After almost six years of working as a reporter at nearby newspapers, Mr. Brooks, 29, makes about $1.55 more an hour at Amazon, and is optimistic he can move up.

“I personally didn’t see the need for a union,” he said. “If I was being treated differently, I may have voted differently.”

Mr. Brooks is one of almost 1,800 employees who handed Amazon a runaway victory in the company’s hardest-fought battle to keep unions out of its warehouses. The result — announced last week, with 738 workers voting to form a union — dealt a crushing blow to labor and Democrats when conditions appeared ripe for them to make advances.

For some workers at the warehouse, like Mr. Brooks, the minimum wage of $15 an hour is more than they made in previous jobs and provided a powerful incentive to side with the company. Amazon’s health insurance, which kicks in on the first day of employment, also encouraged loyalty, workers said.

Carla Johnson, 44, said she had learned she had brain cancer just a few months after starting work last year at the warehouse, which is in Bessemer, Ala. Amazon’s health care covered her treatment.

“I was able to come in Day 1 with benefits, and that could have possibly made the difference in life or death,” Ms. Johnson said at a press event that Amazon organized after the vote.

Patricia Rivera, who worked at the Bessemer warehouse from September until January, said many of her co-workers in their 20s or younger had opposed the union because they felt pressured by Amazon’s anti-union campaign and felt that the wages and benefits were solid.

“For a younger person, it’s the most money they ever made,” said Ms. Rivera, 62, who would have voted in favor of the union had she stayed. “I give them credit. They start you out and you get insurance right away.”

Ms. Rivera left Amazon because she felt she wasn’t adequately compensated for time she had to take off while quarantining after exposure to Covid-19 at work, she said.

Amazon, in a statement after the election, said, “We’re not perfect, but we’re proud of our team and what we offer, and will keep working to get better every day.”

Other workers said in interviews that they or their co-workers did not trust unions or had confidence in Amazon’s anti-union message that the workers could change the company from within. Often, in explaining their position, they echoed the arguments that Amazon had made in mandatory meetings, where it stressed its pay, raised doubts about what a union could guarantee and said benefits could be reduced if workers unionized.

When a union representative called her about the vote, Ms. Johnson said, he couldn’t answer a pointed question about what the union could promise to deliver.

“He hung up on me,” she said. “If you try to sell me something, I need you to be able to sell that product.”

Danny Eafford, 59, said he had taken every opportunity to tell co-workers at the warehouse that he strongly opposed the union, arguing that it wouldn’t improve their situation. He said he had told colleagues about how a union let him down when he lost a job years ago at the Postal Service.

His job, which involves ordering cardboard, tape and other supplies, did not make him eligible to cast a ballot. But when the company offered “VOTE NO” pins, he gladly put one on his safety vest.

“The union’s job is not to keep you — it is to keep everybody,” he said he had told colleagues. “If you are looking for the individual help, it will not be there.”

J.C. Thompson, 43, said he believed a commitment by management to improve the workplace over the next 100 days, a promise made during the company’s campaign. He had joined other anti-union workers in pushing Amazon to better train employees and to educate managers on anti-bias techniques.

“We’re going to do everything that we can to address those issues,” Mr. Thompson said. He appeared with Ms. Johnson at the Amazon event.

Pastor George Matthews of New Life Interfaith Ministries said numerous members of his congregation worked at the warehouse, just a few miles away, and had expressed gratitude for the job. But he was still surprised and disappointed that more did not vote to unionize, even in the traditionally anti-union South, given how hard they described the work.

In talking with congregants, Mr. Matthews said, he has come to believe that workers were too scared to push for more and risk what they have.

“You don’t want to turn over the proverbial apple cart because those apples are sweet — larger than the apples I had before — so you don’t mess with it,” he said.

With its mandatory meetings and constant messaging, Amazon used its advantages to run a more successful campaign than the union, said Alex Colvin, dean of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

“We know campaigns change positions,” he said.

Stuart Appelbaum, the president of the retail workers union that led the organizing effort, cited several factors to explain the loss beyond Amazon’s anti-union efforts.

He pointed to the high rate of turnover among employees, estimating that up to 25 percent of Amazon workers who would have been eligible to vote in early January had left by the end of voting in late March — potentially more than the company’s entire margin of victory. Mr. Appelbaum surmised that people who had left would have been more likely to support the union because they were typically less satisfied with their jobs.

Mr. Brooks said that on the previous Friday, he saw eight or 10 new faces in the area where he worked.

“I was told they were Day 3 employees,” he said, “and I noticed a few more today.”

Many of the workers at the warehouse have complaints about Amazon, wanting shorter hours or less obtrusive monitoring of their production. Mr. Brooks and others said they wished their 10-hour shift had a break period longer than 30 minutes because in the vast warehouse, they can spend almost half their break just walking to and from the lunchroom.

Turnout for the vote was low, at only about half of all eligible workers, suggesting that neither Amazon nor the union had overwhelming support.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, said Thursday in his annual letter to investors that the outcome in Bessemer did not bring him “comfort.”

“It’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees — a vision for their success,” he wrote.

Michael Corkery contributed reporting.

View Original Source

Covid-19 Pushes India’s Middle Class Toward Poverty

by

Anil G. Kumar, a civil engineer, was one of them. Around this time last year, he and his family were about to buy a two-bedroom apartment. But when last year’s lockdown hit, Mr. Kumar’s employer, a construction chemicals manufacturer, slashed his salary by half.

“Everything turned turtle within a few hours,” he said. Three months later, his job had been eliminated.

Now Mr. Kumar spends his days in his home in a working-class neighborhood in the western part of Delhi, searching for jobs on LinkedIn and taking care of his son.

The family’s middle-class life is now under threat. They survive on the $470-a-month salary Mr. Kumar’s wife draws from a private university. Instead of holding a big celebration for their son’s 10th birthday at a restaurant, which would have cost nearly $70, they ordered a cake and a new outfit for about one-fifth the cost. Mr. Kumar also canceled his Amazon Prime subscription, which he hadn’t used in a while.

“Every day you can’t sit on the laptop,” he said. “At times, you feel depressed.”

India’s middle class is central to more than the economy. It fits into India’s broader ambitions to rival China, which has grown faster and more consistently, as a regional superpower.

To get there, the Indian government may need to address the people the coronavirus has left behind. Household incomes and overall consumption have weakened, even though the sales of some goods have increased recently because of pent-up demand. Many of the hardest hit come from India’s merchant class, the shopkeepers, stall operators or other small entrepreneurs who often live off the books of a major company.

“India is not even discussing poverty or inequality or lack of employment or fall in incomes and consumption,” said Mahesh Vyas, the chief executive of the Center for Monitoring of the Indian Economy. “This needs to change first and foremost,” he said.

View Original Source

Unemployment Is High. Why Are Businesses Struggling to Hire?

by

By contrast, “right now what seems to be happening is that job creation is outpacing the search effort that workers are putting forth,” said Professor Marinescu, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “Compared to how people reacted last spring, it’s not that long ago, but the situation has changed a bit.”

That is to say, a similar decline in workers’ desire to pursue jobs matters more when there are plenty of jobs to go around, which is increasingly the case as the economy reopens.

In other research on the expanded jobless benefits, Peter Ganong of the University of Chicago Harris School and five co-authors found a smaller decrease in the inclination to search for jobs than earlier research would have predicted. In other words, those $600 weekly supplements didn’t decrease employment very much.

But those were circumstances that may no longer apply.

“The goal of government should be to get everyone back to work as soon as possible while continuing to provide economic support to workers who have not gone back to work yet,” Mr. Ganong said. “Those two things were not in tension in 2020, and they are in tension in 2021. All of those things that made 2020 special are receding, so we now face a more traditional set of trade-offs.”

Arindrajit Dube, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has also studied the impact of last year’s expanded benefits, is skeptical that the lure of jobless benefits is the primary explanation. He notes that even with the reported shortages, businesses appear to be successfully hiring at a breakneck pace.

Companies added 916,000 employees to payrolls in March alone, a number matched only by the initial rebound from pandemic shutdowns last summer and in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Moreover, the expanded benefits are scheduled to expire in September.

“Maybe an unemployed person spends several additional days unemployed because of the $300,” Professor Dube said. “But if it’s a problem, it takes care of itself. It’s nothing compared to the broader trajectory of the reopening, which swamps anything on the unemployment insurance front.”

View Original Source

Fed Chief Says U.S. Economy Is at an ‘Inflection Point’ as Risks Remain

by

WASHINGTON — The economy is at an “inflection point” and on the cusp of growing more quickly, the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, said in an interview broadcast on Sunday night. But he warned that the crisis was not yet over.

In the interview, with “60 Minutes” on CBS, Mr. Powell said that the American economy “has brightened substantially” as more people are vaccinated and businesses reopen. But he cautioned that “there really are risks out there,” specifically coronavirus flare-ups, if Americans return to normal life too quickly.

“The principal risk to our economy right now really is that the disease would spread again more quickly,” he said. “And that’s troubling. It’s going to be smart if people can continue to socially distance and wear masks.”

The Fed has held interest rates near zero since March 2020 and has been buying about $120 billion in government-backed bonds each month, policies meant to stoke spending by keeping borrowing cheap. Fed officials have been clear that they will continue to support the economy until it is closer to their goals of maximum employment and stable inflation — and that while the situation is improving, it is not there yet.

Mr. Powell reiterated that approach on Sunday, saying that the central bank would “consider raising rates when the labor market recovery is essentially complete, and we’re back to maximum employment, and inflation is back to our 2 percent goal and is on track to move above 2 percent for some time.”

But he said it would “be a while until we get to that place.”

Discussing inflation, Mr. Powell once again made clear that the Fed wanted to see “sustainable” price increases before it adjusted monetary policy.

“Inflation has been below 2 percent,” he said. “We want it to be just moderately above 2 percent. So that’s what we’re looking for.”

“And when we get that,” he added, “that’s when we’ll raise interest rates.”

Some prominent onlookers have warned that the economy has the potential overheat as the federal government pumps out trillions of dollars in stimulus aid and other spending and as the economy reopens, allowing consumers to spend more money.

So far, no sustained inflation spike has materialized.

Figures show the economy is recovering, albeit slowly. Employers added more than 900,000 workers to payrolls last month, but the country is still missing millions of jobs compared with February 2020, and just last week state jobless claims climbed.

Mr. Powell on Sunday highlighted that while some workers were doing well, others had yet to get back to where they were before Covid-19 lockdowns, a phenomenon that will influence when the Fed reduces or removes policy support.

“What you’re seeing is some parts of the economy are doing very well, have fully recovered, have even more than fully recovered in some cases,” Mr. Powell said. “And some parts haven’t recovered very much at all yet. So you do see real disparities between different parts of the economy. It’s sort of unusual for an economy like ours.”

Mr. Powell also pointed to data that shows the burden is falling hardest on those least able to bear it: Lower-income service workers, who are heavily people of color and women, have been hit hard by job losses.

While he expects those workers to get back to their jobs more quickly as the economy rebounds, the Fed needs to “stick with those people and support them as they try to get back to where they were in life, which was working,” he said, adding, “They were in jobs just a year ago.”

View Original Source

The Week in Business: Amazon Defeats the Union

by

Good morning. Here are the top stories in business and tech to know for the week ahead. — Charlotte Cowles

Credit…Giacomo Bagnara

Large companies are often good at dodging taxes to maximize profits for their shareholders. But President Biden wants to make that harder with a new tax code that would raise tax rates and close loopholes for American corporations with annual incomes exceeding $2 billion. The plan is intended to bring in enough tax revenue to fund Mr. Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposal. If it gets through Congress (and that’s a big if), what’s to stop companies from moving profits overseas to tax shelters like the Cayman Islands? The Biden administration has a plan for that, too: a global minimum tax rate that would apply to multinational corporations regardless of where they’re located.

Amazon won its fight against the biggest push for unionization in the company’s history. The tally of votes showed that workers at its giant warehouse in Alabama had decided against forming a union. The results will need to be certified by federal officials. But it’s a big blow to union organizers and Democrats who believed that the timing was right for organized labor to gain momentum around the country. It’s also a major victory for Amazon, which has been accused of union-busting in several states.

It’s two steps forward, one step back for the labor market. New jobless claims were up for the second consecutive week, a sign that employment gains, while still promising, will be uneven for a time. Even though employers added an impressive 916,000 jobs in March, the economy is still 8.4 million jobs short of where it was before the pandemic. And many sectors that were almost totally wiped out — like travel, restaurants and bars — are only now starting to come back.

Credit…Giacomo Bagnara

Coinbase will become the first publicly traded cryptocurrency exchange in the United States when it posts its shares to the Nasdaq this Wednesday. It has become the biggest American cryptocurrency company by making it easy for people to buy and sell Bitcoin and other digital tokens. (The firm charges a fee each time a customer places a trade order.) Last week, Coinbase said it expected a first-quarter revenue of about $1.8 billion. That’s a whopping increase of about 847 percent from the previous year, mostly thanks to Bitcoin’s recent rally.

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is suing the federal government to allow cruise ships to resume sailing from the state’s ports. The boats must meet requirements put in place last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before they can take passengers, but the industry says that the directions lack clarity. Separately, several cruise lines have announced plans to resume operations from other ports in the Caribbean and Bermuda, often with requirements that all passengers be vaccinated. But Mr. DeSantis has prohibited Florida businesses from asking patrons to show proof of vaccination.

As the coronavirus pandemic caused shutdowns, undocumented immigrants were hit especially hard. Their communities suffered disproportionately from high death rates, and they were largely ineligible for unemployment insurance and other pandemic aid. Until now, that is. In New York, the government is offering one-time payments of up to $15,600 to undocumented immigrants who lost work during the pandemic and could not get access to other jobless benefits. The money will come out of a $2.1 billion fund in the state budget, which critics say should have gone to legal New Yorkers who are struggling.

In another victory for Netflix, Sony Pictures Entertainment has struck a five-year deal to give the streaming giant exclusive rights to its films once they leave theaters. In France, Ikea is facing a new lawsuit over a decade-old case in which its executives spied on employees and customers. And more bad news for Boeing: The company has told airlines to ground some of its troubled 737 Max jets — the same model that was grounded for over a year after two deadly crashes — because of an electrical issue.

View Original Source