Labor and Jobs

Covid Workers in China Clash With Police Over Unpaid Wages, Layoffs

After China’s abrupt reversal of “zero Covid” restrictions, the nation’s vast machinery of virus surveillance and testing collapsed, even as infections and deaths surged. Now, the authorities face another problem: Angry pandemic-control workers demanding wages and jobs. In the southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing, hundreds of workers locked in a pay dispute with a Covid […]

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Fed President Backs Slowdown as Support Mounts for Smaller Rate Move

Susan M. Collins, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said she was leaning toward a quarter-point interest rate increase at the central bank’s next meeting — a slowdown that would signal a return to a normal pace of monetary policy adjustment after a year in which officials took rapid action to slow […]

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How This Economic Moment Rewrites the Rules

Indeed, the Federal Reserve is trying to cut it off. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has described the labor market, with twice as many open jobs as unemployed workers, as “unsustainably hot,” and is trying to cool it through aggressive interest rate increases. He and his colleagues have argued repeatedly that a more normal […]

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Good News on Jobs May Mean Bad News Later as Hiring Spree Defies Fed

America’s job market is remarkably strong, a report on Friday made clear, with unemployment at the lowest rate in half a century, wages rising fast and companies hiring at a breakneck pace. But the good news now could become a problem for President Biden later. Mr. Biden and his aides pointed to the hiring spree […]

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With Surge in July, U.S. Recovers the Jobs Lost in the Pandemic

U.S. job growth accelerated in July across nearly all industries, restoring nationwide employment to its prepandemic level, despite widespread expectations of a slowdown as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to fight inflation. Employers added 528,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said on Friday, more than doubling what forecasters had projected. […]

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What Remote Work Debate? They’ve Been Back at the Office for a While.

Gabe Tucker, 26, is a lawyer with Fortif Law Partners in Birmingham, Ala., where the share of job listings that permit remote work is roughly half that of New York’s. Each morning, Mr. Tucker puts on a button-down shirt, drives for 15 minutes and arrives at the office around 8. His routine, in other words, […]

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Who’s to Blame for a Factory Shutdown: A Company, or California?

VERNON, Calif. — Teresa Robles begins her shift around dawn most days at a pork processing plant in an industrial corridor four miles south of downtown Los Angeles. She spends eight hours on her feet cutting tripe, a repetitive motion that has given her constant joint pain, but also a $17.85-an-hour income that supports her family. […]

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A Town’s Housing Crisis Exposes a ‘House of Cards’

HAILEY, Idaho — Near the private jets that shuttle billionaires to their opulent Sun Valley getaways, Ana Ramon Bartolome and her family have spent this summer living in the only place available to them: behind a blue tarp in a sweltering two-car garage. With no refrigerator, the extended family of four adults and two young […]

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United Auto Workers Seek to Shed a Legacy of Corruption

DETROIT — For the United Auto Workers, the last five years have been one of the most troubling chapters in the union’s storied history. A federal investigation found widespread corruption, with a dozen senior officials, including two former presidents, convicted of embezzling more than $1 million in union funds for luxury travel and other lavish […]

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