Hal Harrell, superintendent of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, announced his retirement Monday, according to a Facebook post by his wife, Donna Goates Harrell.
“I am truly grateful for your support and well wishes. My decision to retire has not been made lightly and was made after much prayer and discernment,” the post read. “My wife and I love you all and this community that we both grew up in, and therefore the decision was a difficult one for us.”
Harrell will remain throughout the year until a new superintendent is named, the post said. The school board was holding a meeting Monday night.
Before the meeting Harrell was greeted and hugged by a throng of people. He responded to CNN questions by saying, “I think I’m going to enjoy this right now, thank you.” When pressed further by CNN, Harrell said, “I’m going to visit (with people).”
During the meeting the board went into closed session. According to a meeting agenda part of the closed session was for an “attorney consultation regarding legal issues related to Superintendent retirement and transition.”
Board members were then slated to resume the public part of the meeting and “take possible action regarding Superintendent retirement,” it added.
“My heart was broken on May 24th and I will always pray for each precious life that was tragically taken as well as their families,” the Facebook post said.
According to the post, the superintendent asked his wife “to post this message since he doesn’t have Facebook.”
Last week, Harrell emailed staff about his intention to retire.
“I am in my 31st year in education, all served and dedicated to the students and families here in Uvalde,” Harrell wrote.
That message came hours after the school district announced it was suspending operations of its police force and placing a lieutenant and another top school official on leave as part of its investigation.
The email also came after CNN reported the Uvalde school district had recently hired Crimson Elizondo, a former Texas Department of Public Safety trooper under investigation for her response to the massacre.
Elizondo arrived minutes after the shooting started and was heard on body-worn camera video saying she would have responded differently had her own son been inside the school.
The school district apologized to the victims’ families and the Uvalde community “for the pain that this revelation has caused,” the district said last week. “Ms. Elizondo’s statement in the audio is not consistent with the District’s expectations.”
Elizondo has been fired from the school district and declined to speak with CNN.
A union of railroad track maintenance workers has rejected a tentative agreement with the nation’s freight carriers, renewing the threat that there could be a strike that shuts down this vital link in the nation’s already struggling supply chain.
The vote, announced Monday by the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division, was 43% in favor of the proposed five-year contract, and 57% opposed.
About 12,000 of the 23,000 members of the BMWE participated in the vote. It is the third largest of the major freight railroad unions. The two largest freight unions, which represent the more than 50,000 engineers and conductors who make up the two-person train crews, are conducting the their own rank-and-file ratification vote by mail. Those votes will be counted on Nov. 17.
TheBWME said it will now enter negotiations with the association that represents management at the nation’s major freight railroads in an effort to reach a new deal. Without a new deal there could be a strike, but not until at least Nov. 19, according to the union. Things will remain status quo with the union’s contract until then.
A statement from the association negotiating on behalf of railroad management said it was “disappointed” with the vote, but given that the two sides had decided to maintain thestatus quo, “the failed ratification does not present a risk of an immediate service disruption.”
Even if the members of the two larger unions vote in favor of their deals, they would not report to work if the BMWE were to go on strike. And the fact that the BMWE voted down the contract is probably a sign that rank-and-file anger towards railroad management could lead to no votes at the two larger unions as well.
“I think this is the canary in the coal mine for the engineers’ and conductors’ votes,” said Todd Vanchon, professor of labor studies at Rutgers University. “They were the ones you anticipate would reject a deal. The fact that the BMWE voted no suggests a no vote [by train crew members] is more likely.”
The tentative labor deals were reached on Sept. 15 following a marathon 20-hour bargaining session that included direct intervention from President Joe Biden and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh. The new contracts include an immediate 14% raise with back pay dating to 2020, and raises totaling 24% during the five-year life of the contract that runs from 2020 through 2024. They also gives union members cash bonuses of $1,000 a year. All told, the backpay and bonuses will give union members an average payment of $11,000 per worker once the deal is ratified.
But the deal was difficult to reach not because of the financial terms, but because of work rules that unions said had brought engineers and conductors to a breaking point. Staffing shortages had required crew members to be on call seven days a week, ready to report to work at short notice. And union leadership said those rules, which were adjusted as part of the contract, had caused great anger at management among rank-and-file members.
Despite that discord, the unions’ leadership expressed confidence that their members would ratify the deals, even if they didn’t get everything they wanted at the bargaining table.
“I think we got everything we could,” Dennis Pierce, president of the engineers union, told CNN on the day the deal was reached. “And I think once our membership understands where we sit and what’s in it, I think it’ll ratify.”
Numerous smaller unions have already approved the deal. The only group that initially rejected it, the Machinist union which represents about 5,000 mechanics for locomotives and track equipment and facility maintenance personnel, has subsequently reached a new tentative agreement without a strike. The Machinists’ rank and file is again considering that deal.
The Biden administration was desperate to avoid a rail strike because of fears it would upend already strained supply chains. The major railroads carry 30% of the nation’s freight when measured by weight and distance traveled, and a strike could have caused shortages and higher prices for such essentials as food and gasoline, forced factories without parts to close down and left store shelves empty during the holiday shopping period. The only potential good news for the Biden administration is that if there is a strike, it would now take place after the midterm elections.
Rank and file union member anger hasn’t just been expressed at railroads. Union members working in other industries have recently balked at approving deals, even when recommended by their unions’ leadership. Although most union contracts are ratified, there have been some very high-profile examples of angry union members voting no.
About 10,000 members of the United Auto Workers at farm equipment maker John Deere went on strike last fall after rejecting a tentative agreement. That rejected offer included immediate raises in their base pay of 5% to 6%, and additional wage increases later in the contract that could have increased average pay by about 20% over the six years. And it had a cost-of-living adjustment that would give them additional pay based up future inflation.
But more than 90% of the UAW members at Deere voted no and went on strike, and then stayed on strike after rejecting a subsequent deal. They finally returned to work after five weeks after a third vote on a similar package passed.
Striking workers at cereal maker Kellogg
(K) also rejected a tentative deal and decided to stay on strike in December before finally agreeing to a deal weeks later.
And only 50.3% of film production workers voted in favor of a deal last fall that achieved virtually all the bargaining goals of their union, a contract that averted a strike by 63,000 technicians, artisans and craftspeople which could have brought production of movies, television and streaming shows to a halt.
US factories are humming, and manufacturers are scrambling to find workers as the pace of hiring hits levels not seen in decades.
Friday’s September jobs report showed US manufacturers added another 22,000 workers in September, increasing employment in the sector by nearly 500,000 over the course of the last 12 months.
The nearly 13 million workers employed in US factories make upthe industry’s largest workforce since the Great Recession caused employment in the sector to plunge more than a dozen years ago. Since April, manufacturing employment has been growing at about a 4% annual rate, the fastest sustained pace of growth since 1984, when the sector had more than twice as large a share of US jobs.
And employers say they now are scrambling to fill even more jobs. The sector has had about 800,000 openings for most of the last year, despite the hiring binge, according to the Labor Department’s report.
With supply chains causing problems throughout the global economy, many US companies that depended on overseas suppliers have been shifting their focus to sources of parts and goods much closer to home.
“It was taking months for parts to not only get manufactured but come across and they decided they were willing to pay US manufacturing pricing to get that much faster,” said Hayden Jennison, production manager for Jennison Corporation, a Carnegie, Pennsylvania, company that makes everything from fire fighting equipment to construction machinery. He said there’s enough demand for his goods to staff an entire additional shift at the factory. But even though he’s paying $20 to $30 an hour he can’t find the workers he needs.
“Hiring has been a problem since 2020,” Jennison said. “Hiring experienced candidates that understand the industry, and understand what they’re doing, has been very difficult.”
Typically factory jobs and output take a hit during economic downturns, as they did during the Great Recession. But even with fears of a recession rising now,industry experts don’t expect factory jobs to default to their familiar boom-to-bust cycle this time.
“I think we’re in uncharted territory,” said Jay Timmons, CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers. “For every 100 jobs openings in the sector we only have 60 people who are looking. I think it’ll take quite a while to fill that pipeline.”
Timmons said that pay in the sector is up 5% over the course of the last year, and he expects it to keep rising as manufacturers scramble for skilled labor.
Experts say one of the biggest problems manufacturers face in attracting workers is their perception of the nature of the job.
“We often take a look at the images of manufacturing and we see the sparks flying and a welding environmentand perhaps it’s a little bit dingy, dark. But by and large our manufacturing jobs today are high tech,” said Eric Esoda, CEO of a not-for-profit providing consulting and training services to small- and mid-size manufacturers in Northeast Pennsylvania.
One group employers are looking to for more help: women. Manufacturing remains a male-dominated industry, with only 30% of hourly factory jobs held by women, according to NAM. But that’s up from 27% only two years ago, and the Manufacturing Institute, an education and workforce development arm of NAM, has various programs aimed at raising the share of women workers on factory floors to 35% by 2030.
Today less than 10% of private sector jobs are in manufacturing, compared to more than 40% at the end of World War II. But it is still a key sector of the economy, one that pays much better than many others. The Labor Department reports the average weekly wage for manufacturing jobs is $1,250, or $65,000 annually — 11% more than private sector jobs overall, and 81% more than retail jobs.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated Hayden Jennison’s job title.
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.
New York CNN Business
—
September’s hotly anticipated jobs data ended up cooling markets on Friday. Stocks fell sharply as investors evaluated the report, which showed more jobs than expected were added to the US economy and indicated that more pain-inflicting interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve lie ahead.
But a breakdown of the numbers shows that the Fed’s plans to weaken the labor market to fight persistent inflation may already be working, just not for everybody.
White-collar office workers appear to be feeling the brunt of the Fed’s actions: The financial and business sector saw a large decline in employment last month. Legal and advertising services also experienced drops. Service and construction workers, meanwhile, are still thriving.
What’s happening: The US economy added 263,000 jobs in September, higher than analyst estimates of 250,000. The unemployment rate came in at 3.5%, down from 3.7% in August.
Leading the gain in jobs was the leisure and hospitality industry, which added 83,000 jobs in September — and employment in food services and drinking places made up 60,000 of those jobs alone. Manufacturing and construction also came in hot, adding 22,000 and 19,000 jobs, respectively.
The largest non-governmental losses in jobs came from the financial industry, which shed 8,000 between August and September. Large banks hire in cycles, extending offers to recent graduates in the early fall months. That makes this September’s drop particularly significant.
Business support services — such as telemarketing, accounting and administrative and clerical jobs — are also bleeding jobs. The sector lost 12,000 in September. Meanwhile, legal services lost 5,000 jobs, and advertising services also dropped 5,000 jobs.
What it means: The Federal Reserve’s hawkish policy appears to be cooling certain parts of the economy, but not others. Finance workers are likely beginning to worry as their industry depends on stock and lending markets which have been particularly hard hit by Fed actions.
Friday’s numbers indicate that we’re beginning to see that impact in the employment data.
What remains to be seen is whether the Fed can cool the economy just by loosening employment in white-collar industries or if these losses will trickle down to other industries, hurting lower-income workers.
Coming up:Earnings season begins in earnest this week with big banks like JPMorgan, Citigroup
(C), Morgan Stanley
(MS) and BlackRock
(BLK) reporting. Investors will be watching closely for any guidance on hiring and layoff plans.
Two key inflation indicators, PPI and CPI are also set to be released. Expect markets to react poorly if inflation comes in hot.
A panel of top US economists just released its economic outlook for the next year, and it’s not great.
The panel of 45 forecasters, led by the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), said they expected slower growth, higher inflation, higher interest rates, and weakening employment in both 2022 and 2023 than they previously expected.
Most of the worries come down to the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy.
“More than three-quarters of respondents believe the odds are 50-50 or less that the economy will achieve a ‘soft landing’,” said NABE Vice President Julia Coronado. “More than half the panelists indicate that the greatest downside risk to the U.S. economic outlook is too much monetary tightness.”
NABE panelists downgraded their median forecast for real GDP for the fourth quarter of 2022 to a 0.1% increase, compared to a 1.8% increase in the May 2022 survey. The vast majority of respondents placed more than a 25% probability of a recession occurring in 2023, with the most likely start date in the first quarter.
The latest report comes as a growing number of economists are predicting that recession is imminent. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told CNN on Thursday that it’s “more likely than not” the US will enter a recession, calling it a consequence of the “excesses the economy has been through.”
Friday’s jobs report showed that the share of workers telecommuting or working from home because of the pandemic ticked lower — falling to just 5.2% in September from 6.5% in August.
Fully remote work in the United States, which many predicted would remain the norm long after the pandemic, appears to be edging away, especially as the job market loosens for white collar workers and employees have less leverage.
Last week, a KPMG survey of US-based CEOs found that two-thirds believed in-office work would be the norm within the next three years.
Still, it may not be enough to help an ailing commercial real estate market, where the outlook is dire. New York City office properties declined by nearly 45% in value in 2020 and are forecast to remain 39% below their pre-pandemic levels long-term as hybrid policies continue, according to a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Looking forward: The Bureau of Labor Statistics has noted that while hybrid work may still be popular, Covid-19 is no longer fueling work from home trends. The October report will rephrase its telework questions to remove references to the pandemic.
Since May 2020, each jobs report has asked: “At any time in the last four weeks, did you telework or work at home for pay because of the Coronavirus pandemic?”
In May 2020, 35.4% answered yes.
Starting next month, the question will be revised. “At any time in the last week did you telework or work at home for pay?” it will ask, limiting the timeline and eliminating any reference to the pandemic.
The US bond market is closed for Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Coming later this week:
▸ Third quarter earnings season begins. Expect reports from big banks like JPMorgan Chase
(JPM), Wells Fargo
(WFC), Citigroup
(C), Morgan Stanley
(MS), PNC
(PNC) and US Bancorp
(USB) and consumer staples like Pepsi
(PEP), Walgreen
(WBA)s and Domino’s
(DMPZF).
▸ CPI and PPI, two closely watched measures of inflation in the US are also due to be released.
Pension funds are designed to be dull. Their singular goal — earning enough money to make payouts to retirees — favors cool heads over brash risk takers.
But as markets in the United Kingdom went haywire last week,hundreds ofBritish pension fund managers found themselves at the center of a crisis that forced the Bank of England to step in to restore stability and avert a broader financial meltdown.
All it took was one big shock. Following finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng’s announcement on Friday, Sept. 23 of plans to ramp up borrowing to pay for tax cuts, investors dumped the pound and UK government bonds, sending yields on some of that debt soaring at the fastest rate on record.
The scale of the tumult put enormous pressure on many pension funds by upending an investing strategy that involves the use of derivatives to hedge their bets.
As the price of government bonds crashed, the funds were asked to pony up billions of pounds in collateral. In a scramble for cash, investment managers were forced to sell whatever they could — including, in some cases, more government bonds. That sent yields even higher, sparking another wave of collateral calls.
“It started to feed itself,” said Ben Gold, head of investment at XPS Pensions Group, a UK pensions consultancy. “Everyone was looking to sell and there was no buyer.”
The Bank of England went into crisis mode. After working through the night of Tuesday, Sept. 27, it stepped into the market the next day with a pledge to buy up to £65 billion ($73 billion) in bonds if needed. That stopped the bleeding and averted what the central bank later told lawmakers was its worst fear: a “self-reinforcing spiral” and “widespread financial instability.”
In a letter to the head of the UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee this week, the Bank of England said that if it hadn’t interceded, a number of funds would have defaulted, amplifying the strain on the financial system. It said its intervention was essential to “restore core market functioning.”
Pension funds are now racing to raise money to refill their coffers. Yet there are questions about whether they can find their footing before the Bank of England’s emergency bond-buying is due to end on Oct. 14. And for a wider range of investors, the near-miss is a wake-up call.
For the first time in decades, interest rates are rising quickly around the world. In that climate, markets are prone to accidents.
“What the previous two weeks have told you is there can be a lot more volatility in markets,” said Barry Kenneth, chief investment officer at the Pension Protection Fund, which manages pensions for employees of UK companies that become insolvent. “It’s easy to invest when everything’s going up. It’s a lot more difficult to invest when you’re trying to catch a falling knife, or you’ve got to readjust to a new environment.”
The first signs of trouble appeared among fund managers who focus on so-called “liability-driven investment,” or LDI, for pensions. Gold said he started to receive messages from worried clients over the weekend of Sept. 24-25.
LDI is built on a straightforward premise: Pensions need enough money to pay what they owe retirees well into the future. To plan for payouts in 30 or 50 years, they buy long-dated bonds, while purchasing derivatives to hedge these bets. In the process, they have to put up collateral. If bond yields rise sharply, they are asked to put up even more collateral in what’s known as a “margin call.” This obscure corner of the market has grown rapidly in recent years, reaching a valuation of more £1 trillion ($1.1 trillion), according to the Bank of England.
When bond yields rise slowly over time, it’s not a problem for pensions deploying LDI strategies, and actually helps their finances. But if bond yields shoot up very quickly, it’s a recipe for trouble. According to the Bank of England, the move in bond yields before it intervened was “unprecedented.” The four-day move in 30-year UK government bonds was more than twice what was seen during the highest-stress period of the pandemic.
“The sharpness and the viciousness of the move is what really caught people out,” Kenneth said.
The margin calls came in — and kept coming. The Pension Protection Fund said it faced a £1.6 billion call for cash. It was able to pay without dumping assets, but others were caught off guard, and were forced into a fire sale of government bonds, corporate debtand stocks to raise money. Gold estimated that at least half of the 400 pension programs that XPS advises faced collateral calls, and that across the industry, funds are now looking to fill a hole of between £100 billion and £150 billion.
“When you push such large moves through the financial system, it makes sense that something would break,” said Rohan Khanna, a strategist at UBS.
When market dysfunction sparks a chain reaction, it’s not just scary for investors. The Bank of England made clear in its letter that the bond market rout “may have led to an excessive and sudden tightening of financing conditions for the real economy” as borrowing costs skyrocketed. For many businesses and mortgage holders, they already have.
So far, the Bank of England has only bought £3.8 billion in bonds, far less than it could have purchased. Still, the effort has sent a strong signal. Yields on longer-term bonds have dropped sharply, giving pension funds time to recoup — though they’ve recently started to rise again.
“What the Bank of England has done is bought time for some of my peers out there,” Kenneth said.
Still, Kenneth is concerned that if the program ends next week as scheduled, the task won’t be complete given the complexity of many pension funds. Daniela Russell, head of UK rates strategy at HSBC, warned in a recent note to clients that there’s a risk of a “cliff-edge,” especially since the Bank of England is moving ahead with previous plans to start selling bonds it bought during the pandemic at the end of the month.
“It might be hoped that the precedent of BoE intervention continues to provide a backstop beyond this date, but this may not be sufficient to prevent a renewed vigorous sell-off in long-dated gilts,” she wrote.
As central banks jack up interest rates at the fastest clip in decades, investors are nervous about the implications for their portfolios and for the economy. They’re holding more cash, which makes it harder to execute trades and can exacerbate jarring price moves.
That makes a surprise event more likely to cause massive disruption, and the specter of the next shocker looms. Will it be a rough batch of economic data? Trouble at a global bank? Another political misstep in the United Kingdom?
Gold said the pension industry as a whole is better prepared now, though he concedes it would be “naive” to think there couldn’t be another bout of instability.
“You would need to see yields rise more quickly than we saw this time,” he said, noting the larger buffers funds are now amassing. “It would require something of absolutely historic proportions for that not to be enough, but you never know.”
Just weeks after Ron DeSantis made a very public display of his efforts to keep migrants from coming to Florida, Hurricane Ian’s destruction is drawing a growing number of immigrants to the Republican governor’s state.
“They’re arriving from New York, from Louisiana, from Houston and Dallas,” says Saket Soni, executive director of the nonprofit Resilience Force, which advocates for thousands of disaster response workers. The group is made up largely of immigrants, many of whom are undocumented, Soni says. Much like migrant workers who follow harvest seasons and travel from farm to farm, Soni says these workers crisscross the US to help clean up and rebuild when disaster strikes.
To describe their work, he likes to use a metaphor he says a Mexican roofer once shared with him.
“What you have now is basically immigrants who are sort of traveling white blood cells of America, who congregate after hurricanes to heal a place, and then move on to heal the next place,” Soni says.
Already, Soni says his team has been in the Fort Myers area with hundreds of immigrant workers – about half of whom came from out of state. And he says more will arrive in the coming weeks.
He calls it a “moment of interdependence.” And he says it’s something he hopes DeSantis and others in Florida will recognize.
“Many who were traveling in the opposite direction weeks ago are now traveling to Florida to help rebuild,” he says.
And each morning when they wake up, he says, many migrants have told him they are praying for DeSantis.
“They’re praying for him to lead a good recovery, they’re praying for him to be the best governor he can be. Because they need him and he needs them. And they know that,” Soni says.
Does DeSantis?
“There’s no way that he doesn’t,” Soni says.
But so far, the Florida governor’s words and actions tell a different story.
Back in 2018, DeSantis campaigned for governor with a TV ad showing him teaching his kids to build a wall. And since then, he’s positioned himself as one of the most vocal critics of the Biden administration’s immigration policies and announced high-profile immigration steps of his own, including – most recently – using state funds for two flights taking migrants from Texas to Florida to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
Word that immigrants are now coming to help clean up some of his state’s most storm-ravaged communities hasn’t softened the governor’s stance.
Several minutes into a news conference Tuesday billed as an update on the state’s hurricane response – before he detailed ongoing rescue efforts – DeSantis made a point of trumpeting that three “illegal aliens” were among four people recently arrested on looting allegations.
“These are people that are foreigners, they’re illegally in our country, and not only that, they try to loot and ransack in the aftermath of a natural disaster. I mean, they should be prosecuted, but they need to be sent back to their home countries. They should not be here at all,” he told reporters.
Later in the news conference, CNN’s Boris Sanchez asked DeSantis whether he had any response to reports that Venezuelans in New York were being recruited to work on recovery efforts, and whether the governor would also be trying to send those migrants back north.
DeSantis doubled down on his earlier message.
“First of all, our program that we did is a voluntary relocation program. I don’t have the authority to forcibly relocate people. If I could, I’d take those three looters, I’d drag them out by their collars, and I’d send them back to where they came from,” the governor said, drawing applause from officials surrounding him.
He went on to describe a funeral he attended this week of a Pinellas County sheriff’s deputy who was killed in a hit and run by a front-end loader that authorities allege was driven by an undocumented Honduran immigrant.
Then he ended the news conference, making no mention of immigrant workers who were putting tarps on roofs or clearing debris.
Hurricane Ian is the first major hurricane to hit Florida since DeSantis took office in January 2019.
Many migrants coming now to help rebuild, Soni says, have responded in the past to numerous major disasters in Florida and across the country.
“Many are from Venezuela. Many are from Honduras and Mexico. They represent all of the different waves of migrants that have been arriving into the US and into this industry. Many of them who I’ve known since Hurricane Katrina and who have a dozen hurricanes under their belt,” he said. “But there are also newer migrants. I just met a group of Venezuelan asylum-seekers who were arriving to do the work.”
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History notes in its description of an artifact in its collection that after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, “Many homeowners undertook their own clean-up, but much was performed by immigrant laborers attracted to the region by the promise of hard work and good wages.”
Sergio Chávez, an associate professor of sociology at Rice University who studies Mexican roofers, describes Katrina as a “key moment” that shaped the identities and careers of many of the hundreds of men he’s interviewed.
A little more than half of the roofers in the group he’s studied are undocumented immigrants, Chávez says. And when he’s spoken with roofers across the United States – based in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio and Kentucky – Chávez says a common detail quickly emerges when he asks how they ended up in those locations.
“They always name a storm,” he says.
After Hurricane Ian, he says, many of those roofers are poised to head to Florida. Deciding exactly when to go to a disaster zone is a strategic decision, Chávez says, noting that arriving too early can be problematic.
“There’s no telephone service, gasoline, food, housing,” he says. “They also have to be really careful not to just work for anybody, because otherwise they may not get compensated for the work that they do.”
But there’s no doubt they’re going to Florida, he says, and that they’ll play a key role in the state’s recovery.
“DeSantis is not scaring them away,” Chávez says.
That doesn’t mean they won’t face some hostility once they get there, just like they have in other communities.
“My guys for the most part do experience ‘the look.’ They do get pulled over, maybe. But for the most part, any time they go to a lot of these different locations, they are there to do work which the local population sees as essential. So they get their work done,” Chávez says.
On the ground in communities, Chávez says he’s seen contradictions between people’s political beliefs and their actions. Some may support anti-immigrant rhetoric, he says, but then look the other way when they need certain services that immigrant workers provide.
A bigger problem, Chávez says, is that when these workers face abuses – like wage theft or unsafe housing conditions – there aren’t enough laws to protect them, or local authorities may be hesitant to enforce them.
On top of that, the work is physically demanding and risky.
Chávez says he’s spoken with many roofers about on-the-job injuries.
“A lot of these guys have fallen and they don’t have access to health insurance. Their bodies are no longer the same. They have bad knees, bad backs,” he says.
So why do roofers and other disaster recovery workers keep setting out for these destinations, storm after storm?
Even though wage theft is a major problem some face, there’s the potential to earn good wages, send their earnings to families in their home country and possibly advance to higher-paying jobs over time, Chávez says. So it’s a choice that makes economic sense to many, despite the risks.
Desperation is also a factor, Soni says.
“Part of what’s happened is because this is such dirty, dangerous work, and the conditions are so harsh, the most desperate people – those with no other economic avenues, those who are willing to be transient for a year or more – are the ones who join,” he says.
When it comes to the physical and economic risks, Soni says Resilience Force does what it can to protect workers by helping them negotiate fair wages and payment with contractors, and making sure they have the right safety equipment as they set out to rebuild homes and schools.
But those aren’t the only construction projects they’ll be working on in Florida, Soni says.
“We also try to rebuild a society that’s better than it was before the storm,” he says. “And it’s better when there are more relationships and there are more bonds between different people. … Politics can change when the people in a place change their minds.”
After previous hurricanes, he says, the organization has led workers on service projects rebuilding uninsured homes, then hosted meals where homeowners and workers can talk with the help of interpreters.
“Those bonds have lasted. People have become friends and people have changed their minds,” he says. “What that often looks like in Florida or Louisiana is for someone who thought immigration was their most important issue, well, after a hurricane, immigration becomes the 35th most important issue. And what’s more important is, how are we going to stay in this place to survive and thrive again? Who will it take? What family will it take to bring this place back? And that family usually includes the immigrants who helped rebuild the place.”
DeSantis may not take note of this. But as Florida rebuilds, Soni is betting that community leaders and homeowners who need help will.
Editor’s Note: Gad Levanon is the chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute. He’s the former head of The Conference Board’s Labor Market Institute. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.
To many economists and analysts, the US economy has represented a paradox this year. On the one hand, GDP growth has slowed significantly, and some argue, even entered a recession. On the other hand, overall employment growth has been much stronger than normal.
While GDP declined at an annualized rate of 1.1% in the first half of 2022, the US economy added 2.3 million jobs in the last six months, far more than in any other six-month period in the 20 years prior to the pandemic.
This tight labor market – and the rapid wage growth it has spurred – is causing inflation to become more entrenched. The Consumer Price Index, which measures a basket of goods and services, was 8.3% year-over-year in August. That’s lower than the 40-year high of 9.1% in June, but still painfully high. To address it, the Federal Reserve is likely to drive the economy into a recession in 2023, crushing continued job growth.
Why has employment growth remained so strong? First, the US economy is holding on better than many expected. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate for real GDP growth in the third quarter of 2022 is 2.3%, suggesting that while the economy is now growing much more slowly than it did last year, we are still not in a recession. When the demand for goods and services strengthens, so does the demand for workers producing these goods and services.
Second, despite the slowing of the economy and the growing fears of recession, layoffs are still historically low. Initial claims for unemployment insurance, an indicator highly correlated with layoffs, were 219,000 for the week ended October 1 – higher than the week prior, but still one of the lowest readings in recent decades. After years of increasingly traumatic labor shortages, many employers are reluctant to significantly reduce the number of workers even as their businesses are slowing. That’s because companies are worried that they will have trouble recruiting new workers when they start expanding again.
Third, many industries are growing faster than normal because they are still recovering from the pandemic. Convention and trade show organizers, car rental companies, nursing homes and child day care services, among others, are all growing fast because they are still well below pre-pandemic employment levels.
Fourth, just as some industries are growing because they are still catching up, others are experiencing high growth as they adjust to a new normal of higher demand. Demand for data processing and hosting services, semiconductor manufacturing, mental health services, testing laboratories, medical equipment and pharmaceutical manufacturing is higher than before the pandemic. And it’s likely that these represent structural changes to buying patterns that will keep demand high.
Fifth, during the pandemic, corporate investments in software and R&D reached unprecedented levels, which drove a rapid increase in new STEM jobs. Because these workers are especially well paid, they have had plenty of disposable income to spend on goods and services, which has supported job growth throughout the economy.
These factors are spurring positive momentum that will not disappear overnight. Employment growth is likely to slow down from its historically high rates, but it will still remain solid in the coming months. ManpowerGroup’s Employment Outlook Survey shows that the hiring intentions for the fourth quarter are still very high, despite dropping from the previous quarter.
Next year, however, will look very different. Many of the industries that are still recovering from the pandemic will have reached pre-pandemic employment levels. With demand saturated, those industries may revert to slower hiring. But this alone is unlikely to push job growth into negative territory. What will do that is monetary policy.
There are two ways to rein in the labor market: Either reduce demand for workers or increase the labor supply. But it’s hard to engineer a boost in labor supply. That takes the kind of legislative action needed to increase immigration, drive people into the labor force or grow investment in workforce training. This is likely to prove elusive in today’s polarized political environment.
The only option that leaves the Fed is to engineer a recession by continuing to raise interest rates. Expect to see that happen in 2023.
The OPEC+ decision to dramatically cut its oil output targets has left the White House grappling with a complex – and potentially damaging – mix of geopolitical and domestic challenges with few easy answers.
President Joe Biden now faces the reality that an already complex and tenuous bilateral relationship with Saudi Arabia has deeply fractured, the Western effort to isolate and shrink Russia’s war effort has taken a direct hit and the US economy and political picture have both grown more fragile.
“Disappointment. We’re looking at what alternatives we may have” to bring down oil prices, Biden told reporters when asked his reaction to the OPEC+ news.
“There’s a lot of alternatives. We haven’t made up our mind yet,” he added.
Biden’s advisers are now re-doubling efforts to find policy and diplomatic options to address the unwelcome surprise.
“We’re going to work to identify the tools that we have to ensure that organizations like OPEC that assign quotas to their members of how much to produce are not – have a muted and less of an impact on American consumers, and quite frankly, on the global economy,” Amos Hochstein, Biden’s top energy envoy, told Bianna Golodryga on CNN’s “New Day” Thursday.
The full scale of the fallout from Saudi Arabia-led oil cartel’s decision may not be apparent for months or longer, officials say. But they are also keenly aware just how many acutely important elements of the administration’s foreign and domestic agenda the production cut spills directly into.
Biden administration officials acknowledge they’re in a very difficult position over their relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken called OPEC’s move to cut oil production both “shortsighted and disappointing,” and said the administration is reviewing a “number of response options” when it comes to US-Saudi relations.
“We will not do anything that would infringe on our interests, that’s first and foremost, what will guide us,” Blinken said during a news conference in Peru on Thursday. “We will keep all of those interests in mind and consult closely with all of the relevant stakeholders as we decide on any steps going forward.”
There is clearly a tacit effort underway to evaluate ways to respond to the OPEC+ decision to cut back oil production by 2 million barrels per day. But as has been laid bare repeatedly over the course of Biden’s time in office, the power dynamics between the US and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are simply in a different place now than at any earlier point due to the economic and energy pressures tied to Russia’s invasion.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has made abundantly clear he feels no need to be the junior actor, and his overt and explicit moves toward China and Russia have ensured there is no subtlety in his approach.
On a purely oil market basis, the Saudis prize stability over anything else – stability the OPEC+ configuration has provided after damaging price wars and the volatility of the pandemic. Moscow, of course, is the key player in that configuration and it’s notable that beneath the output cut, an extension of the OPEC+ arrangement was also approved on Wednesday.
Still, while administration officials always viewed Biden’s trip to Jeddah – which resulted in the diplomatic fist bump seen around the world – as a critical regional security move, the cartel’s willingness to move in ways so obviously detrimental to US interests has reverberated across the administration. Biden again defended the trip Thursday, saying, “The trip was not essentially for oil. The trip was about the Middle East and about Israel and rationalization of positions.”
“It’s not always about us, we get it,” one US official said. “But they’re just as aware of the perceptions and implications of this move as we are.”
The most obvious lever for the US to pull is security related – it’s far and away the biggest leverage point. But the ramifications of any moves on that front are much broader than the bilateral relationship, officials note, and would directly undercut more than a year of intensive work to establish a coherent regional security posture.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s statement on Wednesday that it “is clear OPEC+ is aligning with Russia” and its war effort was as intentional as it was blunt. Hochstein, in his CNN interview, reiterated that the OPEC+ decision was a “huge mistake” and “the wrong thing to do” amid Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine and high energy prices, saying that Russia and Saudi Arabia are “working together.”
US officials had previously been cautious about directly criticizing the obvious dance Saudi Arabia and others in the region have conducted with Moscow. That posture is gone.
Biden administration officials, according to people with knowledge, made very clear to the Saudis in the days leading up the move that US rhetoric would change dramatically and they would open the door to new options to respond to a major cut. The specifics of those options were left somewhat ambiguous intentionally. But the warning was there.
One notable line in the White House statement issued Wednesday by National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and national security adviser Jake Sullivan statement was the idea of working with Congress on legislation related to OPEC.
It’s a reference to a bill that would remove sovereign immunity from antitrust suits, opening the door for the US to sue cartel members. The White House has been cool to the idea due to the very real concern it would launch a price war with the market’s biggest players that would only serve to hurt US consumers. But just cracking the door open to looking at it is notable – and underscores the scale of the anger inside the West Wing.
The legislative reference underscores a key piece how the response will play out in the weeks ahead – the White House has made its statement, which – in a world of cautious diplo-speak – was sharply critical. Now officials have said they are perfectly comfortable letting congressional Democrats rail on the Saudis on their behalf, something they expect to only escalate in the days ahead given the convergence of geopolitical and domestic political factors.
The blistering response from Capitol Hill has the potential to create some the kind of pressure that could create space to pursue actions the administration has been wary of pursuing up to this point.
Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, for instance, tweeted, “I thought the whole point of selling arms to the Gulf States despite their human rights abuses, nonsensical Yemen War, working against US interests in Libya, Sudan, etc, was that when an international crisis came, the Gulf could choose America over Russia/China.”
The biggest focus for the White House now on oil is on the domestic front. Biden’s top energy and economic advisers met privately with oil executives last week and discussions between officials and industry players have continued this week. Another meeting is likely soon as they continue to search for options to boost US production.
While several options have been floated – including some that infuriate the industry, like potential curbs on exports – it remains unclear whether the White House is ready to move forward on any of them.
A question being weighed now is if OPEC+’s decision changes that dynamic at all in a relationship between the White House and industry that has ping-ponged between clear animosity to cooler heads prevailing and back toward palpable tension over the course of the last several months.
The White House rhetorical reversal hinting at the potential for new Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases, a complete 180-degree turn in less than 24 hours, was notable even if it didn’t signal anything concrete.
What it did signal, however, was a clear message to markets that the option was, in fact, on the table.
Blinken on Thursday once again highlighted what the administration has done to boost oil production in the US.
“We’ve taken a number of steps over the last months to try and ensure that that’s the case, including releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, increasing significantly our production. Oil production is up in the United States by about 500,000 barrels a day,” he said.
Blinken also added that the administration is “looking at other steps that we can take to ensure that there is adequate supply to meet to meet global demand.”
The final release of 10 million from Biden’s announced 180 million barrel release over six months is still scheduled for November, even though the actual total barrels released will fall under the full amount Biden initially targeted. Cracking the door open on additional releases was an effort to signal there is a view inside the White House that there are still metaphorical bullets in the chamber if they need them.
One key point to remember amid the hand-wringing: Predictions of specific price increases at the pump are a fool’s errand.
“I believe it will have less of an impact in the United States and far more of an impact on lower-income countries around the world,” Hochstein said.
The market has been pricing in the output cut for several days. A key element of the output cut is that nearly all OPEC+ members have been missing their production targets for months. So “2 million barrels per day” is actually far less than that from a production basis.
In other words, there are a myriad of factors that drive retail prices – such as in California, where soaring gas prices over the last two weeks were in large part due to a mess of refinery issues – and no single answer to the range of new complications White House officials are now facing.
Biden’s message, behind his disappointment with the production cut, was clear cut, according to Hochstein.
“The President is still instructing us to work, to do whatever we can,” he said.
Four kidnapped California family members – including a baby girl – were found dead in a farm area Wednesday, authorities said, two days after they were abducted from their business in a case where investigators have detained a suspect but not announced a motive.
The bodies of 8-month-old Aroohi Dheri, her parents Jasleen Kaur and Jasdeep Singh, and her uncle Amandeep Singh were recovered by authorities Wednesday evening after a farmworker alerted them to remains in an orchard in central California’s Merced County, authorities said.
The discovery, coming a day after a suspect in the case was detained, was announced by a visibly emotional sheriff who said the killings were “completely and totally senseless.”
“There’s a special place in hell for this guy,” Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said Wednesday night, referring to the suspect.
“A whole family (was) wiped out, and we still don’t know why,” Warnke said.
The suspect, identified by the Merced Sheriff’s Office as 48-year-old Jesus Manuel Salgado, remains in custody but has not been charged.
Salgado is “suspected of involvement in the kidnapping and death of the four victims,” Alexandra Britton, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department, told CNN on Thursday.
Salgado was previously in prison for nearly a decade after being convicted of attempted false imprisonment, first degree robbery and possession of a controlled substance, according to records from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
The family was kidnapped at gunpoint – an abduction recorded on surveillance video – from their trucking business Monday morning in Merced, a city between Modesto and Fresno in central California, authorities said. Investigators learned they were missing after a family vehicle was found abandoned and on fire that morning, authorities said.
Police took the suspect into custody Tuesday after his family told law enforcement he admitted to being involved in the kidnapping, Britton said.
“The circumstances around this, when we are able to release everything, should anger the hell out of you,” Warnke said.
The suspect attempted suicide sometime before he was taken into custody, and he has been receiving medical attention, Warnke said.
Warnke did not say how the family was slain. He said it appears they were killed where they were found, and killed before the sheriff’s department was notified Monday that the family was missing.
Salgado is the main suspect in the killings, though investigators believe others may have been involved, according to Warnke, who did not elaborate on the extent of that involvement.
“I fully believe that we will uncover and find out that there was more than just him involved,” Warnke said.
He has been providing information to investigators, and officials are working with him to identify a motive, Warnke said.
00:56 – Source:
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‘Our worst fears were realized’: Sheriff makes announcement about missing family
In the previous case, Salgado was sentenced to 11 yearsin January 2007. He was released on parole in June 2015, and his parole supervision ended in Jun 2018, the department told CNN in an email.
CNN is working to identify Salgado’s legal representative for comment.
Earlier Wednesday, authorities released surveillance footage of the kidnapping at the family’s Merced trucking business Monday morning.
The video shows Jasdeep Singh arriving at the business’ parking lot at 8:30 a.m., followed by Amandeep Singh arriving nine minutes later.
Shortly before 9 a.m., Jasdeep is seen encountering a man outside the business. The man carried a trash bag and pulled out what appeared to be a firearm, the video shows.
Several minutes later, Jasdeep and Amandeep are seen with their hands tied behind their backs as they get into a truck. Shortly after, the truck leaves and returns six minutes later.
Upon returning, the suspect enters the business and exits with a gun in hand as Jasleen Kaur holds 8-month-old Aroohi and walks in front of the suspect to the truck.
Later Monday, a farmer found two of the victims’ cell phones on a road, authorities said. At one point, the farmer answered the phone and spoke with a relative of the victims.
Before the bodies were found Wednesday evening, a family member had urged people to come forward with any information in the case.
“This is a peace-loving family and running a small business in the Merced area,” pleaded Balvinder, a family member. “This is something that nobody is prepared for dealing with … we are just hoping and praying every moment.”
On Tuesday morning, investigators learned that an ATM card belonging to one of the victims was used at a bank in Atwater, California, which is about 9 miles northwest of Merced, the sheriff’s office said.
It is unclear whether the man in custody is the person who used that card, Britton said.
The suspect in custodywas convicted in 2005 in a case involving armed robbery and false imprisonment and was paroled in 2015, Warnke said.
In that previous case, the man acted alone and knew the victims, according to Warnke.
Amazon on Monday launched a new shopping portal called Amazon Access that is designed for shoppers receiving governmentassistance.
The shopfront features SNAP EBT on Amazon, information about the Amazon Layaway program that all shoppers can use to pay for their orders over time and spotlights discounts and coupons for any customer on essential grocery items.
Amazon already offers some services for low-income customers, such as discounted Amazon Prime membership. It also accepts Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP benefits for groceries purchased through Amazon Grocery, Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods. The company said the new portal is meant to be a centralized hub that puts these individual benefits all in one place.
“Given the tough economic climate with many facing rising costs on essential needs, we want our customers to know about all the accessible offerings available on Amazon, no matter their circumstances,” said Nancy Dalton, head of community partnerships for Amazon Access.
Amazon
(AMZN) also announced it has renamed its discounted Prime membership to Prime Access. Eligible customers can sign up for the service on Amazon
(AMZN) Access.
Neil Saunders, retail analyst and managing director at GlobalData Retail, said the new portal could be useful for lower-income shoppers.
“It is something positive Amazon can point to, which shows it is helping hard-pressed consumers during a more difficult economic period,” said Saunders, adding that Amazon “should be able to generate some incremental sales out of consolidating the benefits into a new shopfront.”
At the same time, he didn’t think Amazon Access would help boost Prime membership numbers significantly.
“Amazon sees this as a way of growing Prime at a time when it is near to saturation in the US, as there are still many lower income consumers who do not have access to the program,” said Saunders. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in an April 2021 letter to shareholders that the company has more than 200 million Prime members worldwide.
Earlier this year,Amazon said the price of its annual Prime subscriptions would increase from $119 to $139 per year in the United States and its monthly subscription would also increase from $12.99 to $14.99.
The company said it was increasing the cost because of “expanded Prime membership benefits,” such as added Prime Video content and expanded free same-day shipping, as well to compensate for the rising costs of labor and transportation in its distribution network.
OPEC+ said Wednesday that it will slash oil production by 2 million barrels per day, the biggest cut since the start of the pandemic, in a move that threatens to push gasoline prices higher just weeks before US midterm elections.
The group of major oil producers, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, announced the production cut following its first meeting in person since March 2020. The reduction is equivalent to about2%of global oil demand.
The price of Brent crude oil rose 1.5% to more than $93 a barrel on the news, adding to gains this week ahead of the gathering of oil ministers. US oil was up 1.7% at $88.
The Biden administration criticized the OPEC+ decision in a statement on Wednesday, calling it “shortsighted” and saying that it will hurt low and middle-income countries already struggling with elevated energy prices the most.
The production cuts will start in November, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its allies will meet again in December.
In a statement, the group said the decision to cut production was made “in light of the uncertainty that surrounds the global economic and oil market outlooks.”
Global oil prices, which soared in the first half of the year, have since dropped sharply on fears that a global recession will depress demand. Brent crude is down 20% since the end of June. The global benchmark hit a peak of $139 a barrel in March after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
OPEC and its allies, which control more than 40% of global oil production, are hoping to preempt a drop in demand for their barrels from a sharp economic slowdown in China, the United States and Europe.
Western sanctions on Russian oil are also muddying the waters. Russia’s production has held up better than predicted, with supply being diverted to China and India. But the United States and Europe are now working on ways to implement a G7 agreement to cap the price of Russian crude exports to third countries.
The oil cartel came under intense pressure from the White House ahead of its meeting in Vienna as President Biden tried to secure lower energy prices for US consumers. Senior Biden administration officials were lobbying their counterparts in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to vote against cutting oil production, according to officials.
The prospect of a production cut was framed as a “total disaster” in draft talking points circulated by the White House to the Treasury Department on Monday, which CNN obtained. “It’s important everyone is aware of just how high the stakes are,” one US official said.
With just a month to go before the critical midterm elections, US gasoline prices have begun to creep up again, posing a political risk the White House is desperately trying to avoid.
Rising oil prices could mean inflation remains higher for longer, and add to pressure on the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates even more aggressively.
But the impact of Wednesday’s cut, while a bullish signal for oil prices, may be limited as many smaller OPEC producers were struggling to meet previous production targets.
“An announced cut of any volume is unlikely to be fully implemented by all countries, as the group already lags 3 million barrels per day behind its stated production ceiling,” Rystad Energy analyst Jorge Leon said in a note.
Rystad Energy estimates that the global oil market will be oversupplied between now and the end of the year, dampening the effect of production cuts on prices.
— Alex Marquardt, Natasha Bertrand, Phil Mattingly, Mark Thompson and Betsy Klein contributed to this report.
When Parag Agrawal took over as Twitter’s CEO last November following co-founder Jack Dorsey’s surprise resignation from the role, he was little known outside the company.
Ten months later, Agrawal has featured prominently in a whistleblower disclosure, been rebuked by name in a Congressional hearing and fielded criticism from the world’s richest man (and his possible future boss) both publicly and privately.
The complications are not letting up. Elon Musk this week proposed following through with the deal to buy Twitter
(TWTR) at the originally agreed upon price of $54.20 per share, according to a Tuesday securities filing. The move could bring to an end the ongoing legal battle over Musk’s attempt to pull out of the $44 billion acquisition deal, which is set to go to trial in two weeks. If Twitter
(TWTR) decides to move forward with the proposal, Agrawal could soon either be out of a job or be working for the billionaire with whom he’s spent months quarreling.
Even for a company accustomed to periods of upheaval, Agrawal’s tenure leading Twitter has been marked by an unusual degree of chaos: a nightmare acquisition battle with Musk; a former executive alleging serious security vulnerabilities; and an economic downturn hitting its core advertising business.
That would be a lot to navigate for even the most seasoned chief executive. But Agrawal, a decade-long veteran of Twitter who previously served as its CTO, had never previously run a company — let alone one of the world’s most important social media platforms.
“I think Parag was elevated because they thought everything would be status quo,” said Bill Klepper, management professor at Columbia Business School. The past year has been anything but that.
Despite the challenges, Agrawal has managed to continue growing the platform’s user base and has launched various new features, including testing the long-awaited edit button. But there are sincere doubts about whether Agrawal will survive another year, whether because Musk buys the company and then removes him, or because the board replaces him if the deal falls through.
Meanwhile, some lawmakers and regulators are suggesting Agrawal could be probed in the wake of the whistleblower allegations, which directly implicate Agrawal, both as CEO and in his previous role at CTO.
“I’m sure when he goes home at night, he says to himself, ‘What the hell did I get myself into?’” said Klepper.
Twitter declined to comment for this story.
From the start, Agrawal had a daunting task. The company’s existing goal was to somehow add 100 million additional daily active users by 2023,a 45% increase from the fourth quarter of 2021, and grow its annual revenue to $7.5 billion, up from just over $5 billion in 2021. At the same time, it was exploring new revenue opportunities, such as its Twitter Blue subscription service and cryptocurrency-related features.
“The challenge for Twitter is that they still have not been able to grow their user base and improve their monetization to the level where their monetization is on par with their influence,” Forte said.
Then came Musk.
In March, after months of quietly amassing Twitter shares, Musk met with Dorsey, although he was no longer Twitter’s CEO, to “discuss the future direction of social media,” according to a company filing. In the days that followed, Musk met with Twitter’s board and some of its leadership team, including Agrawal; publicly announced that he’d become Twitter’s largest shareholder; and accepted a seat on the company’s board.
Days later, Musk tweeted, “Is Twitter dying?” Agrawal texted Musk later that day to say the tweet was making his life difficult as CEO.
“You are free to tweet ‘is Twitter dying?’ or anything else about Twitter,” Agrawal said in the text to Musk, revealed in a court filing last week, “but it’s my responsibility to tell you that it’s not helping me make Twitter better in the current context. Next time we speak, I’d like you to provide [your] perspective on the level of internal distraction right now and how [it’s] hurting our ability to do work … I’d like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and don’t get distracted, but we aren’t there right now.”
Musk responded tersely: “What did you get done this week?” In two follow-up texts, he rescinded his agreement to join the board, saying, “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time.”
Musk then abandoned the board seat, threatened a hostile takeover and ultimately agreed to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share, a significant premium to the company’s share price at the time, only to then attempt to withdraw from the deal months later, citing concerns about the number of bots and spam accounts on the platform. Twitter sued him to complete the deal — and now must decide whether to accept Musk’s proposal to suspend the litigation process and move forward with completing the deal. (Twitter said Tuesday it had received Musk’s letter and intends “to close the transaction at $54.20 per share.”)
Throughout the dispute, Agrawal has had to reassure shareholders, advertisers and employees about an acquisition by a billionaire who has been publicly critical of the platform while also confronting public jabs from someone who could be his new boss.
In May, Musk and Agrawal appeared to openly feud on Twitter over the Tesla CEO’s claims about bots. Agrawal posted a tweet thread attempting to explain the prevalence of false and spam accounts on the platform and the company’s efforts to quantify and address them; Musk responded with a poop emoji.
Twitter — which many legal experts say has the stronger case if the dispute goes to trial — has sought to have a judge force Musk to follow through with the acquisition agreement. In that case, it seems unlikely Musk would keep Agrawal as CEO or that Agrawal would choose to stay.
In a text message exchange with Dorsey in April after the deal was signed, Musk suggested he would be unable to work with Agrawal. “Parag is just moving far too slowly and trying to please people who will not be happy no matter what he does,” Musk said in a text.
If Musk takes over the company and Agrawal is removed, Agrawal could receive a payout worth tens of millions of dollars, including compensation for his stock options.
But even if Musk wins, or the two sides agree on a settlement that allows Musk to get out of the deal, Klepper said Agrawal remaining as CEO could be a longshot. In the event Musk walks, Twitter’s stock could take a hit. The company would also still be facing the same challenges to its business, compounded by attrition amid the uncertainty with Musk.
“They’ve got a lot of stuff to clean up,” he said. “The first thing they’re going to do is bring in a new leadership, someone who has turnaround experience.”
As the legal battle with Musk heated up, Twitter was hit with another blow: Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, the company’s former head of security and a highly regardedfigure in the information security world, went public with a whistleblower complaint.
Zatko accused the company of having serious security vulnerabilities that threatened users, investors and US national security. He also alleged that the company is at risk of foreign interference and that its executives, including Agrawal, have misled regulators and the company’s own board.
The first months of a new CEO’s tenure are typically spent meeting with various parts of the company and discussing strategy with their board, Klepper said. But according to internal documents included in Zatko’s whistleblower disclosure, in December and January, Agrawal was also fielding concerns from Zatko that the new CEO and other executives had presented false information about the company’s security posture to the board, in what Zatko alleged could amount to fraud. In January, the Twitter board’s audit committee launched an investigation into Zatko’s worries.
Twitter says that the investigation concluded Zatko’s allegations were unfounded and that he was fired for poor performance; Zatko maintains he was fired in retaliation for speaking up. Twitter has said the whistleblower disclosure paints a “false narrative” of the company that is “riddled with inconsistencies and inaccuracies and lacks important context.”
Still, the whistleblower’s claims have placed an even greater spotlight on the company and Agrawal. Earlier this month, leading members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent Agrawal a letter seeking information, and requested responses by Sept. 26. It’s not clear whether Twitter has responded to the letter.
During a Senate hearing with Zatko, Sen. Chuck Grassley blasted Agrawal for not accepting an invitation to testify alongside the whistleblower. Twitter declined to make Agrawal available amid its concerns that his testimony could jeopardize the company’s ongoing litigation with Musk, according to Grassley.
Grassley didn’t stop there. If Zatko’s claims turn out to be accurate, he said, “I don’t see how Mr. Agrawal can maintain his position at Twitter.”
Amazon on Wednesday said it is raising the average starting pay for its warehouse workers and delivery drivers to more than $19 an hour, up from $18 previously, at a time when union pushes continue to spread across several of its facilities.
With the increase, which takes effect next month, Amazon’s frontline employees in the United States will earn between $16 and $26 per hour depending on their position and location in the country, the company said.
Amazon is investing nearly $1 billion in the pay increase and other worker benefits, according to the company.
The announcement comes ahead of the busy holiday season for the e-commerce giant, and as rising inflation has more broadly been eroding Americans’ take-home pay.
The moves also come as Amazon has confronted labor organizing efforts at multiple warehouses, much of which was borne out of workers’ frustration with how the company treated them during the pandemic as well as increased national attention to racial justice and equity.
Workers at a warehouse in Staten Island, New York, made history earlier this year when they voted to form the company’s first US labor union. Another union election at an Amazon facility near Albany, New York, is set to take place next month. These workers are seeking to unionize with the same grassroots worker group, Amazon Labor Union, that succeeded in Staten Island.
Through organizing efforts, Amazon workers have been seeking higher wages, job security, improved conditions at facilities and to have more of a voice in their workplace.
In addition to the wage increase, the company said Wednesday that it is expanding its pay access program, dubbed Anytime Pay, to all employees across its US operations. The program provides Amazon employees access to up to 70% of their eligible earned pay whenever they choose during the month, and without fees. Previously, most Amazon employees received their paychecks once or twice monthly.
It wasn’t hard for Samantha Losey,managing director of Unity, a public relations firm in London, to convince her team to work fewer hours for the same paycheck.
But it was an uphill battle to persuade her ownboard to join the world’s biggest pilot of the four-day work week.
“I had to fight very hard for us to do this as a business… nobody was willing. Everyone was very traditionalist,” Losey told CNN Business.
The main concern centered on whethera 20% cut to weekly working hours would lead to a drop inoutput, and cause clients to flee.
But after a “very difficult journey” to convince her board, and a rocky start, Losey said her team has hit its stride. Shesaid she is 80% sure everyone will keep the routine after November, when the trial ends.
“[My head] would roll like Marie Antoinette’s if I said to this team ‘we’re not doing this anymore’,” she said.
Unity is one of 70 companies in the United Kingdom participating in the trial. For six months starting in June, more than 3,300 employees have worked 80% of their usual hours — for the same rate of pay — in exchange for promising to deliver 100% of their usual work.
The program is being run by the nonprofit organization4 Day Week Global; Autonomy, a think tank; and the 4 Day Week UK Campaign, in partnership with researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College.
Already, the trial is bearing fruit for workers hungry for more free time.
Halfway into the pilot, 95% of companies surveyed by 4 Day Week Global say their productivity levels have either stayed the same or improved, while 86% say they are likely to make the routine permanent.
For Gary Conroy, founder and CEO of 5 Squirrels, a skincare product manufacturer on England’s south coastwith 13 full-time employees, the new work routine gets “better and better all the time,” he told CNN Business.
Some of the benefits were unexpected.
“We’ve all lost a lot of weight…we were overweight before,” he said. “[The team has] more time to prepare food, [eat] healthily. Lots of people are going to the gym a lot more.”
Four months into the trial, Losey said her clients are happy with their performance, while her team is much more inspired and creative. An internal study at the company found that productivity was up 35% and staff said they were feeling healthier and happier, compared to before the trial.
Now, people are scrambling to join the company.
“We were dying at the beginning of the year trying to find talent and we were spending money on recruiters left, right and center,” she said.
But since Unity joined the program, Losey said she’s “never ever had so many applications,” saving the business a lot of money in recruitment costs.
While her board is still skeptical about the impact on the business output, Unity’s clients are “desperate” for the experiment to pay off, she said — so they can convince their bosses to adopt the routine in their ownworkplaces.
“[I] literally had a client today saying… I’m going to take it to the HR department,” Losey added.
Juliet Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College, told CNN Business’ Christine Romans that the four-day work week provides “a major competitive advantage for firms in the labor market.”
“Americans are finding that two days is not enough for the weekend. They can’t get all of their errands and family care [done] and taking their kids to activities, and even just a little bit of time for themselves, and preparing for the work week,” she said. “All of that gets crammed into two days and it’s just not enough.”
“The five-day week is just not working for people anymore,” Schor added.
Yet a four-day work week is no silver bullet.
In June, a Gallup survey of more than 12,000 workers in the United States found that while those working a four-day week reported higher well-being — particularly among those required to work on-site — there was no corresponding uptick in levels of engagement in their jobs.
“Having higher engagement comes down to how you’re managed, and just giving someone a four-day work week isn’t necessarily going to mean that you’re well managed and that you’re engaged in your work,” Jim Harter, chief scientist of workplace and well-being at Gallup, told CNN Business.
For Losey, adjusting to the new routine was painful, however.
She described the first week as “Armageddon,” with too few colleagues available to respond to a client emergency. “I just sat down on the kitchen floor and cried,” she said.
Slowly, the team has adapted, and introduced new habits that have made all the difference. Now, internal meetings are capped to 15 minutes, and client meetings to 30 minutes. Emails to colleagues are not allowed to exceed more than a quarter of a day’s total emails.
In particular, Losey’s staff swears by a “traffic light” system to reduce distractions in the office. Colleagues have a light on their desk, and set it to green if they are happy to talk, amber if they are busy but available to speak, and red if they do not want to be interrupted.
“If [their] button is red, go after someone at your peril,” Losey said.
Conroy said he has introduced “deep work time” where, for two hours every morning and two hours every afternoon, his staff ignore emails, calls or instant messages and concentrate on their projects.
His team has even started unplugging the office phones, as they were too distracting. Clients were initially bothered, he said, but have since responded by sending more emails.
Losey said the risks to the business have been worth seeing through.
“After us having had several smooth weeks… it feels like ‘how would we go back?’ How did we work five days?’ It just seems so un-human,” she said.
A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here.
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Investors, economists and members of the Federal Reserve will be poring over the September jobs report on Friday morning for clues about the health of the economy. But one figure may matter more than most…and it’s not the number of jobs added or the unemployment rate. It’s wage growth.
Inflation is not just a function of the price of oil and other commodities and production costs like manufacturing and shipping. How much workers take home in their paychecks is also a big part of the inflation picture.
When people have more money in their wallets (virtual or good old-fashioned leather ones), they tend to be more willing to spend it. That gives companies additional flexibility to raise prices.
Average hourly wages rose 5.2% over the past 12 months according to the August jobs report. That’s down from a 2022 peak growth rate of 5.6% in March.
Companies can’t raise prices as much if workers are making less or they risk big destruction in demand.
The problem is that wage growth above 5% is still historically high. Before the pandemic, wages typically rose just 3% year-over-year. But labor shortages, due to Covid-19 and people dropping out of the workforce, shifted power from employers to employees when it came to worker pay.
That’s another reason why companies have continued to raise prices: To offset rising costs.
The government reported Friday that its preferred inflation metric, personal consumption expenditures (PCE), rose 6.2% from a year ago in August. That was lower than July’s reading.
But the so-called core PCE figure, which excludes food and energy prices, rose 4.9% through August, up from a 4.7% increase in July.
What’s more, the Fed typically is looking for just a 2% growth rate in the headline PCE number as a sign of price stability. That’s not going to happen anytime soon. In fact, the Fed’s latest forecasts suggest that the central bank thinks PCE will rise 5.4% this year, up from projections of 5.2% in June.
“I don’t see anything in the near-term to give the Fed tons of comfort that inflation is on the trajectory to 2%,” said David Petrosinelli, senior trader with InspireX. “Wages will remain elevated and that will keep the Fed in a pickle.”
“Wages are a real pain point. People are paying more but not making more,” said Marta Norton, chief investment officer of the Americas with Morningstar Investment Management. With that in mind, Norton said there is a “higher probability of stagflation.”
Stagflation is the nasty economic combination of stagnant growth and persistent inflation.
Retail sales have held up relatively well despite inflation pressures, but Norton warns that can’t last forever. American shoppers would eventually reach their breaking point and just start buying essentials. A slowdown in consumption will inevitably lead to lower prices…but also slower economic growth.
“Inflation is its own cure. Consumers have the power to spend or not spend,” she said.
The third quarter is mercifully over. It’s been another doozy for the market. September in particular was bleak. It was the worst month for the Dow since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.
But even though we’re seemingly in a bear market for everything as bonds, gold and bitcoin have all tumbled this year as well, there are some hopeful signs for the next few months.
The fourth quarter is typically a festive time on Wall Street. Investors tend to buy stocks in anticipation of robust consumer shopping during the holidays. Businesses typically spend more as well to flush out those yearly budgets. And major companies also often give rosy guidance in October about earnings expectations for the coming year.
“October has been a turnaround month—a ‘bear killer’ if you will,” said Jeff Hirsch, editor-in-chief of the Stock Trader’s Almanac, in a recent blog post.
Hirsch added that a dozen bear markets since World War II have ended in the month of October. And of those twelve, seven market bottoms happened during midterm election years.
Traders will definitely be keeping close tabs on Washington this fall to see if Republicans gain control of the House. That could lead to more gridlock in DC, which investors tend to like.
Whether or not Corporate America and investors are going to be so bullish this October is up for debate given the concerns about inflation, interest rates and the global economy. After all, October is also famous for huge crashes, most recently in 2008 but also in 1987 and, of course, 1929.
So stocks definitely could take another turn for the worse. But experts are hopeful that the end of the bear market is in sight.
“We’re nearer to a bottom,” said Christopher Wolfe, chief investment officer of First Republic Private Wealth Management. “A lot of quality companies are on sale. It’s a time to be patient and reposition.”
Monday: US ISM manufacturing; China stock markets closed all week
Tuesday: US job openings and labor turnover (JOLTS); Japan inflation; Australia interest rate decision
Wednesday: US ADP private sector jobs; US ISM services; OPEC+ meeting
Thursday: US weekly jobless claims; earnings from ConAgra
(CAG), Constellation Brands
(STZ), McCormick
(MKC) and Levi Strauss
(LEVI)
Friday: US jobs report; Germany industrial production; earnings from Tilray
(TLRY)
Coolio, the ’90s rapper who lit up the music charts with hits like “Gangsta’s Paradise” and “Fantastic Voyage,” has died, his friend and manager Jarez Posey, told CNN. He was 59.
Posey said Coolio died Wednesday afternoon.
Details on the circumstances were not immediately available.
When contacted by CNN, Capt. Erik Scott of the Los Angeles Fire Department confirmed that firefighters and paramedics responded to a call on the 2900 block of South Chesapeake Ave. at 4 p.m. local time for reports of a medical emergency. When they arrived, they found an unresponsive male and performed “resuscitation efforts for approximately 45 minutes.”
The patient “was determined dead just before 5:00 p.m.,” Scott said.
“We are saddened by the loss of our dear friend and client, Coolio, who passed away this afternoon,” a statement provided to CNN from Coolio’s talent manager Sheila Finegan said.
“He touched the world with the gift of his talent and will be missed profoundly. Thank you to everyone worldwide who has listened to his music and to everyone who has been reaching out regarding his passing. Please have Coolio’s loved ones in your thoughts and prayers.”
Actor Lou Diamond Phillips also offered his condolences as he recounted some memories with the artist.
“I am absolutely stunned. Coolio was a friend and one of the warmest, funniest people I’ve ever met. We spent an amazing time together making Red Water in Capetown and we loved going head to head in the kitchen. He was one of a kind. Epic,Legendary and I’ll miss him,” Phillips said in a tweet.
Former NBA player Matt Bonner also recalled time spent with Coolio, saying in a Twitter post the rapper was a “huge hoops fan… we hosted him at a game a few years back… biggest crowd of all-time at a Spurs Overtime concert.”
Coolio grew up in Compton, California, according to a bio on his official website.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 1994, he recalled falling into the drug scene but getting himself out by pursuing a career as a firefighter.
“I wasn’t looking for a career, I was looking for a way to clean up – a way to escape the drug thing,” he told the publication. “It was going to kill me and I knew I had to stop. In firefighting training was discipline I needed. We ran every day. I wasn’t drinking or smoking or doing the stuff I usually did.”
His rap career began in the ’80s, and he gained fame in the underground scene.
“Fantastic Voyage” was the first song that really put him on the map.
Arguably his biggest song, “Gangsta’s Paradise,” from the soundtrack to the film “Dangerous Minds,” grew his star power to gigantic proportions. He won a Grammy in 1996 for the song.
In the age of streaming, it has continued to live on. In July 2022, the song reached a milestone one billion views on YouTube.
“It’s one of those kinds of songs that transcends generations,” he said in a recent interview. “I didn’t use any trendy words…I think it made it timeless.”
Over his career, Coolio sold more than 17 million records, according to his website.
Coolio also has a special place in the hearts of some Millennials for his work on the theme song for the popular Nickelodeon TV series “Kenan and Kel” and his contribution to the album “Dexter’s Laboratory: The Hip-Hop Experiment,” which featured songs by various hip-hop artists that were inspired by the Cartoon Network animated series.
In recent years, Coolio enjoyed the perks of being a nostalgic figure, making television appearances on shows like “Celebrity Cook Off” and “Celebrity Chopped.”
He also had a show on Oxygen, “Coolio’s Rules,” that aired 2008.
As the US attempts to wean itself off its heavy reliance on fossil fuels and shift to cleaner energy sources, many experts are eyeing a promising solution: your neighborhood big-box stores and shopping malls.
The rooftops and parking lot space available at retail giants like Walmart, Target and Costco is massive. And these largely empty spaces are being touted as untapped potential for solar power that could help the US reduce its dependency on foreign energy, slash planet-warming emissions and save companies millions of dollars in the process.
At the IKEA store in Baltimore, installing solar panels on the roof and over the store’s parking lot cut the amount of energy it needed to purchase by 84%, slashing its costs by 57% from September to December of 2020, according to the company. (The panels also provide some beneficial shade to keep customers’ cars cool on hot, sunny days.)
As of February 2021, IKEA had 54 solar arrays installed across 90% of its US locations.
Big-box stores and shopping centers have enough roof space to produce half of their annual electricity needs from solar, according to a report from nonprofit Environment America and research firm Frontier Group.
Leveraging the full rooftop solar potential of these superstores would generate enough electricity to power nearly 8 million average homes, the report concluded, and would cut the same amount of planet-warming emissions as pulling 11.3 million gas-powered cars off the road.
The average Walmart store, for example, has 180,000 square feet of rooftop, according to the report. That’s roughly the size of three football fields and enough space to support solar energy that could power the equivalent of 200 homes, the report said.
“Every rooftop in America that isn’t producing solar energy is a rooftop wasted as we work to break our dependence on fossil fuels and the geopolitical conflicts that come with them,” Johanna Neumann, senior director for Environment America’s campaign for 100% Renewable, told CNN. “Now is the time to lean into local renewable energy production, and there’s no better place than the roofs of America’s big-box superstores.”
Advocates involved in clean energy worker-training programs tell CNN that a solar revolution in big-box retail would also be a significant windfall for local communities, spurring economic growth while tackling the climate crisis, which has inflicted disproportionate harm on marginalized communities.
Yet only a fraction of big-box stores in the US have solar on their rooftops or solar canopies in parking lots, the report’s authors told CNN.
CNN reached out to five of the top US retailers — Walmart, Kroger, Home Depot, Costco and Target — to ask: Why not invest in more rooftop solar?
Many renewable energy experts point to solar as a relatively simple solution to cut down on costs and help rein in fossil fuel emissions, but the companies point to several roadblocks — regulations, labor costs and structural integrity of the rooftops themselves — that are preventing more widespread adoption.
The need for these kinds of clean energy initiatives is becoming “unquestionably urgent” as the climate crisis accelerates, said Edwin Cowen, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.
“We are behind the eight ball, to put it mildly,” Cowen told CNN. “I would have loved to see policy help incentivize rooftop solar 15 years ago instead of five years ago in the commercial space. There’s still a tremendous amount of work to do.”
Neumann said Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, possesses by far the largest solar potential. Walmart has around 5,000 stores in the US and more than 783 million square feet of rooftop space — an area larger than Manhattan — and more than 8,974 gigawatt hours of annual rooftop solar potential, according to the report.
It’s enough electricity to power more than 842,000 homes, the report said.
Walmart spokesperson Mariel Messier told CNN the company is involved in renewable energy projects around the world, but many of them are not rooftop solar installations. The company has reported having completed on- and off-site wind and solar projects or had others under development with a capacity to produce more than 2.3 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Neumann said Environment America has met with Walmart a few times, urging the retailer to commit to installing solar panels on roofs and in parking lots. The company has said it’s aiming to source 100% of its energy through renewable projects by 2035.
“Of all the retailers in America, Walmart stands to make the biggest impact if they put rooftop solar on all of their stores,” Neumann told CNN. “And for us, this report just underscores just how much of an impact they could make if they make that decision.”
According to Environment America, Walmart had installed almost 194 megawatts of solar capacity on its US facilities as of the end of the 2021 fiscal year and additional capacity in off-site solar farms. The company’s installations in California were expected to provide between 20% to 30% of each location’s electricity needs.
Target ranked No. 1 for on-site solar capacity in 2019, according to industry trade group Solar Energy Industries Association’s most recent report. It currently has 542 locations with rooftop solar — around a quarter of the company’s stores — a Target spokesperson told CNN. Rooftop solar generates enough energy to meet 15% to 40% of Target properties’ energy needs, the spokesperson said.
Richard Galanti, the chief financial officer at Costco, said the company has 121 stores with rooftop solar around the world, 95 of which are in the US.
Walmart, Target and Costco did not share with CNN what their biggest barriers are to adding rooftop or parking lot solar panels to more stores.
Approximate number of households companies could power with rooftop solar
Walmart — 842,700
Target — 259,900
Home Depot — 256,600
Kroger — 192,500
Costco — 87,500
Source: Environment America, Frontier Group report, “Solar on Superstores”
“My suspicion is that they want an even stronger business case for deviating from business-as-usual,” Neumann said. “Historically, all those roofs have done is cover their stores, and rethinking how [they] use their buildings and thinking of them as energy generators, not just protection from rain, requires a small change in their business model.”
Home Depot, which has around 2,300 stores, currently has 75 completed rooftop solar projects, 12 in construction and more than 30 planned for future development, said Craig D’Arcy, the company’s director of energy management. Solar power generates around half of these stores’ energy needs on average, he said.
Aging rooftops at stores are a “huge impediment” to solar installation, D’Arcy added. If a roof needs to be replaced in the next 15 to 20 years or sooner, it doesn’t make financial sense for Home Depot to add solar systems today, he said.
“We have a goal of implementing solar rooftop where the economics are attractive,” D’Arcy told CNN.
CNN also reached out to Kroger, which owns about 2,800 stores across the US. Kristal Howard, a Kroger spokesperson, said the company currently has 15 properties — stores, distribution centers and manufacturing plants — with solar installations. One of the “multiple factors affecting the viability of a solar installation” was the stores’ ability to support a solar installation on the roofs, Howard said.
Cowen, the engineering professor at Cornell, said solar is already attractive, but that labor costs, incentives and the different layers of regulation likely pose some financial challenges in solar installations.
“For them, this means usually hiring a local site firm that can do that installation that also knows local policy,” Cowen said. “It’s just another layer of complexity that I think is beginning to make sense because the costs have come down enough, but it needs kind of reopening that door of getting into an existing building.”
Rep. Sean Casten of Illinois, who co-chairs the power sector task force in the House, said the US has “failed to provide the incentives to people who have the expertise to go in and build these things.” The reason both retail companies and the power sector have not made much progress on solar is because “our system is so disjointed” and has a complex regulation structure, Casten said.
“Why aren’t we doing something that makes economic sense? The answer is this horribly disjointed federal policy where we massively subsidize fossil energy extraction, and we penalize clean energy production,” Casten told CNN. “For a long, long time, if you wanted to build a solar panel on the rooftop of Walmart, your biggest enemy was going to be your local utility because they didn’t want to lose the load.
“We could have done this decades ago,” Casten added. “And had we done it, we would not be in this dire position with the climate, but we’d also have a lot more money in our pocket.”
For Charles Callaway, director of organizing at the nonprofit group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, strengthening the rooftop solar capacity in big box retail stores is a no-brainer, especially if companies allow the local community to reap benefits either through installation jobs or sharing the electricity produced later.
Either way, it would put a massive dent in curbing the climate crisis and help usher in an equitable transition away from fossil fuels — and it’s doable, Callaway told CNN.
The New York City resident led a worker training program that helped train more than 100 local community members, mostly people of color, to become solar installers. He also formed a solar workers cooperative to ensure many of the participants of the training program get jobs in a tough market.
In the last two years, Callaway said his group has not only installed solar panels on roofs of affordable housing units, but also equipment capable of producing 2 megawatts of solar energy on shopping malls up in upstate New York. He emphasized that hiring locally would be most beneficial since local installers know the community and local regulations best.
“One of my huge concerns is social equity,” Cowen said. “Access to renewable energy is a fairly privileged position these days, and we’ve got to figure out ways to make that not true.”
Jasmine Graham, WE ACT’s energy justice policy manager, said the potential of building rooftop solar on big box superstores is encouraging, only “if these projects use local labor, if they are paying prevailing wages, and if this solar is being used in a manner such as community solar, which would allow [utility] bill discounts for folks that live in the same utility zone.”
Pressure is mounting for global leaders to act urgently on the climate crisis after a UN report in late February warned the window for action is rapidly closing.
Neumann believes the US can meet its energy demand with renewables. All it takes, she said, is the political will to make that switch, and the inclusion of the local community so no one gets left behind in the transition.
“The sooner we make that transition, the sooner we’ll have cleaner air, the sooner we’ll have a more protected environment and better health and the sooner we’ll have a more livable future for our kids,” Neumann said. “And even if that requires investment, it is an investment worth making.”
A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
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Amend the Constitution! Touch the third rail!Think big and make things better!
This is the big ideas period of American politics – a time that occurs roughly every four years in the lead-up to a presidential election – when candidates push expansive proposals, usually short on specifics.
While the big ideas generally have little chance of becoming law, they speak to what the people who want to be president think will move primary voters.
With President Joe Biden currently a lock for the Democratic nomination, most of the intellectual action this year is among Republicans.
Below are some of the big ideas of the moment, which are usually unique to one or two candidates as opposed to positions that are standard for the party. I view these as distinct from the daily political issues – things like abortion rights, foreign policy, border security and gender rights, where there is a sliding scale of positions.
Nikki Haley: Biden ‘likely’ won’t make it to end of second term
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, whois 51, wants to impose a “mental competency” test for older candidates over 75.
With both of the current leading candidates – Biden and former President Donald Trump – well beyond when most peoplewould consider retirement, age is already a major issue this year.
It’s a smart way to tap into fears that Biden, in particular, has lost a step. But it’s hard to imagine itactually put into use. Who would administer this test? Who would assess the results? Why not all candidates?
The point of the democratic system is that voters should get to choose. This proposal would necessarily limit their choices.
On the other hand, age limits are not an entirely crazy idea. Corporations impose them on executives, for instance. Pilots have a mandatory retirement age of 65, although that could be raised in the near future to deal with a pilot shortage.
Vivek Ramaswamy,a biotech founder,wants to raise the legalvoting age to 25. It’s hard to imagine how this would work since the current voting age of 18 is guaranteed in the 26th Amendment.
Democrats like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have in recent years pushed to go in the opposite direction, arguing to lower the voting age to 16.
Ramaswamy says there would be exceptions to raising the voting age, such as for people who join the military or otherwise meet a “national service requirement.” Others could pass the same test given to naturalized immigrants.
“I want more civic engagement. My hypothesis is that when you attach greater value to the act, we will see more 18-to-25-year-olds actually vote than do now,” Ramaswamy told The Washington Post.
Nikki Haley calls for raising retirement age
Nikki Haley and former Vice President Mike Pence are among those pushing to change the age at which Americans can access retirement benefits.
While both Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis are swearing up and down that they will protect these key parts ofthe social safety net, Haley and Pence are calling for a more honest discussion about the nation’s finances.
In their telling, raising the retirement age would only affect the youngest Americans – people in their 20s and younger, generations sure to live and work longer than their forebears.
But specifics are hard to come by, as CNN’s Jake Tapper found when he asked Haley at a CNN town hall in early June what retirementage she is proposing. She said more calculations are needed to come up with a specific retirement age for people currently in their 20s.
Meantime, she said, “we’re going to go tell them ‘Times have changed.’ I think (Trump and DeSantis are)not being honest with the American people.”
DeSantis did recently acknowledge in New Hampshire that Social Security is “going to look a little bit different” for younger generations.
Pence, at his own CNN town hall in early June, said raising the eligibility age for Social Security is one option to have the tough conversation about national spending, but not the only one.
“It also could include letting younger Americans invest a portion of their payroll taxes in a mutual fund, like the TSP (Thrift Savings Plan) program that 10 million federal employees are in today,” he said.
Trump slams 14th Amendment at rally
Both former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis want to revoke birthright citizenship, or the right of every person born in the US to be an American citizen.
They complain that even babies born to undocumented peoplebecome citizens. Birthright citizenship is guaranteed in the 14th Amendment, the key post-Civil War amendment that was meant to protect former slaves.
Trump has been teasing an end to birthright citizenship for years, but there is not currently a meaningful effort to change the Constitution.
Trump has pledged to sign an executive order. DeSantis has said he would lean on Congress and the court system. Actually changing the Constitution would be nearly impossible in today’s political environment.
Former President Donald Trump’s most outside-the-box ideas have a futuristic “Jetsons” feel.
He wants to build new “freedom cities” on federal land to reopen the American frontier and give people a chance at home ownership. He argues the plan could revitalize American manufacturing.
And he envisions freeing Americans from hellish commutes by looking to the skies, taking the initiative to innovate vertical-takeoff vehicles. CNN’s report on Trump’s proposals notes that technology is already underway by industry, but a long way from being available to consumers.
A government-planned city might seem like a strange proposal for a candidate whose party has long embraced free market ideals. But the idea of a planned city is not completely foreign – justlook at Washington, DC.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to undo Trump’s greatest bipartisan achievement: The First Step Act, a criminal justice and sentencing reform law.
The product of intense bipartisan negotiations during Trump’s term in office, the law was hailed for rethinking harsh prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.
But the political landscape has changed since 2018, when Trump signed the law as president and DeSantis voted for it as a congressman. Now, DeSantis calls the law the “jailbreak bill.”
Both men want to impose the death penalty for drug offenders, an especially awkward pivot for Trump, who has bragged about his compassion in setting drug dealers like Alice Johnson free when he commuted her sentence. The case helped build support for the First Step Act. Her crime could have made her eligible for the death penalty under his new plan.
Trump still brags about the First Step Act, and repealing it would take help from Democrats in the Senate.
DeSantis, meanwhile, is moving to the right of Trump on crime and even vetoed a bipartisan criminal justice law in Florida that passed easily through the Republican-dominated legislature.
Pence also said in his CNN town hall he would “take a step back” from the First Step Act – though it is unclear what that means in practical terms.
During his six months as Twitter’s CEO and owner, Elon Musk decimated its ad business, alienated some news publications and VIP users, and plunged the platform into a constant state of chaos.
Now, a new chief executive will be tasked with trying to turn things around.
Musk announced on Friday that he would in the coming weeks hand the CEO role over to Linda Yaccarino, a longtime media executive and former chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal. Yaccarino has said little publicly so far, beyond noting her excitement to “transform this business together.”
Twitter is in desperate need of stability from a leader. And Yaccarino brings the ad industry chops that Twitter sorely needs to lure back top advertisers and boost its business after a turbulent period. But she may struggle to address Twitter’s biggest problem: Elon Musk.
Although Musk is handing off the CEO title — and, perhaps, trying to shed some of the accountability that comes with it — the billionaire remains firmly in charge of the company as its owner and executive chair. Musk will still be in the C-Suite as Twitter’s chief technology officer. And he continues to be Twitter’s most-followed user, meaning his controversial statements to his nearly 140 million followers could still create headaches for the company.
In tech, the CEO is often the public face of the brand. But Musk will almost certainly continue to fill that role, with or without the title, likely to Twitter’s detriment.
Just this week, Musk drew backlash for baselessly attacking billionaire George Soros, a frequent target for antisemitic conspiracy theories, saying the financier “hates humanity.” Musk’s Twitter also faced criticism in recent days for removing some tweets and accounts at the behest of Turkey’s government amid the country’s election; the company later said it would object to the removal requests in court.
On Tuesday, Musk said he “didn’t care” if his controversial tweets drew the ire of Twitter advertisers or Tesla shareholders. “I’ll say what I want to say, and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it,” Musk said in an interview with CNBC.
“The question is: can she help balance [Musk]?” said Tim Hubbard, management professor at University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. He added that top ad buyers are more likely to take calls from Yaccarino than from Musk, who has previously said he hates advertising.
But “the big problem with Twitter right now is, they’re on a pathway that turns advertisers off, turns users off,” Hubbard said. “Unless there are fundamental changes at Twitter, I don’t think [the leadership change] is going to have the immediate effect that Elon is hoping it will have.”
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
The Musk issue was on full display at NBCU’s ad upfront this week, which was held shortly after Yaccarino resigned from the company following rumors of her appointment as Twitter’s CEO. On stage at the event, which aimed to promote NBCU’s platforms to advertisers, a talking bear sang to audience members: “Twitter may seem like the place to begin, but Twitter just let all the crazies back in.”
Even if Musk pulls back on his tweeting, a feat he seems constitutionally incapable of achieving, it will be no easy task for Yaccarino to revive Twitter’s advertising business — let alone expand it.
Many major advertisers left the platform following Musk’s takeover over concerns about an uptick of hate speech, frustrations over layoffs of much of the company’s ad and safety teams and general uncertainty about the platform’s future. Just 43% of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers as of September, the month before Musk’s takeover, were still advertising on the platform as of last month, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
But for many, leaving Twitter may not have been a particularly difficult call.
Even in the best of times, Twitter was an also-ran in the digital ad space compared to tech giants like Meta and Google, with a smaller user base and less sophisticated ad targeting technology. And Musk’s takeover came as many advertisers have pulled back their digital ad spending across the board during a precarious moment for the economy. That could only add to the difficulty Yaccarino will face in shoring up Twitter’s business.
Musk, for his part, has been attempting to supplement, and potentially largely replace, Twitter’s ad business with subscriptions, but it appears that only a tiny fraction of Twitter users have bought in. The selection of Yaccarino suggests a recognition on his part that the company he bet $44 billion on will continue to be reliant on ad sales for the foreseeable future.
It’s unclear how much freedom Yaccarino will have to hire additional staff to support her likely remit to revive advertising on Twitter after Musk laid off around 80% of the company’s staff last year. And even if she is able to hire, top talent may be wary of joining Twitter after Musk upended the company’s culture and reportedly rolled back benefits like work-from-home and extended parental leave.
“Personnel is going to be a huge challenge for her … if tech workers are looking for a stable working environment, they will probably stay away from Twitter,” Hubbard said.
But Musk’s ongoing influence remains the biggest potential hurdle.
Musk has said he will oversee product, technology and software and systems operations, while Yaccarino will focus on business operations. The announcement has left open the question of whether Musk will remain in charge of controversial policy decisions, many of which — including allowing users to buy blue verification checks and restoring the accounts of rule violators, including white supremacists — have threatened Twitter’s popularity with users and advertisers.
“Cleaning up Twitter requires reversing Musk’s dangerous policy decisions, reinvesting in content moderation and enforcement, and restructuring the platform’s governance,” Jessica Gonzalez, co-CEO of media watchdog Free Press who helped found the #StopToxicTwitter campaign encouraging advertisers to avoid the platform, said in a statement.
“Musk is setting future CEO Linda Yaccarino up to fail — as long as he continues to make the platform toxic, it will be impossible to lure back advertisers and users,” she said.”
Many have raised alarms about the potential for artificial intelligence to displace jobs in the years ahead, but it’s already causing upheaval in one industry where workers once seemed invincible: tech.
A small but growing number of tech firms have cited AI as a reason for laying off workers and rethinking new hires in recent months, as Silicon Valley races to adapt to rapid advances in the technology being developed in its own backyard.
Chegg, an education technology company, disclosed in a regulatory filing last month that it was cutting 4% of its workforce, or about 80 employees, “to better position the Company to execute against its AI strategy and to create long-term, sustainable value for its students and investors.”
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said in an interview with Bloomberg in May that the company expects to pause hiring for roles it thinks could be replaced with AI in the coming years. (In a subsequent interview with Barrons, however, Krishna said that he felt his earlier comments were taken out of context and stressed that “AI is going to create more jobs than it takes away.”)
And in late April, file-storage service Dropbox said that it was cutting about 16% of its workforce, or about 500 people, also citing AI.
In its most-recent layoffs report, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said 3,900 people were laid off in May due to AI, marking its first time breaking out job cuts based on that factor. All of those cuts occurred in the tech sector, according to the firm.
With these moves, Silicon Valley may not only be leading the charge in developing AI but also offering an early glimpse into how businesses may adapt to those tools. Rather than render entire skill sets obsolete overnight, as some might fear, the more immediate impact of a new crop of AI tools appears to be forcing companies to shift resources to better take advantage of the technology — and placing a premium on workers with AI expertise.
“Over the last few months, AI has captured the world’s collective imagination, expanding the potential market for our next generation of AI-powered products more rapidly than any of us could have anticipated,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston wrote in a note to staff announcing the job cuts. “Our next stage of growth requires a different mix of skill sets, particularly in AI and early-stage product development.”
In response to a request for comment on how its realignment around AI is playing out, Dropbox directed CNN to its careers page, where it is currently hiring for multiple roles focused on “New AI Initiatives.”
Dan Wang, a professor at Columbia Business School, told CNN that AI “will cause organizations to restructure,” but also doesn’t see it playing out as machines replacing humans just yet.
“AI, as far as I see it, doesn’t necessarily replace humans, but rather enhances the work of humans,” Wang said. “I think that the kind of competition that we all should be thinking more about is that human specialists will be replaced by human specialists who can take advantage of AI tools.”
The AI-driven tech layoffs come amid broader cuts in the industry. Many tech companies have been readjusting to an uncertain economic environment and waning levels of demand for digital services more than three years into the pandemic.
Some 212,294 workers in the tech industry have been laid off in 2023 alone, according to data tracked by Layoffs.fyi, already surpassing the 164,709 recorded in 2022.
But in the shadow of those mass layoffs, the tech industry has also been gripped by an AI fervor and invested heavily in AI talent and tech.
In January, just days after Microsoft announced plans to lay off 10,000 employees as part of broader cost-cutting measures, the company also confirmed it was making a “multibillion dollar” investment into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. And in March, in the same letter to staff Mark Zuckerberg used to announce plans to lay off another 10,000 workers (after cutting 11,000 positions last November), the Meta CEO also outlined plans for investing heavily in AI.
Even software engineers in Silicon Valley who once seemed uniquely in demand now appear to be at risk of losing their jobs, or losing out on salary gains to those with more AI expertise.
Roger Lee, a startup founder who has been tracking tech industry layoffs via his website Layoffs.fyi, also runsComprehensive.io, which examines job listings and compensation data across some 3,000 tech companies.
Lee told CNN that a recent analysis of data from Comprehensive.io shows the average salary for a senior software engineer specializing in artificial intelligence or machine learning is 12% higherthan for those who don’t specialize in that area, a data point he dubs “the AI premium.” The average salary for a senior software engineer specializing in AI or machine learning has also increased by some 4% since the beginning of the year, whereas the average salary for senior software engineers as a whole has stayed flat, he said.
Lee noted Dropbox as an example of a company offering notably high pay for AI roles, citing a base salary listing of $276,300 to $373,800 for a Principal Machine Learning Engineer role. (By comparison, Comprehensive.io’s data puts the current average salary for a senior software engineer at $171,895.)
Those looking to thrive in the tech industry and beyond may need to brush up on their AI skills.
Wang, the professor at Columbia Business School, told CNN that starting this past spring semester, he began requiring his students to familiarize themselves with the new crop of generative AI tools on the market. “That type of exposure I think is absolutely critical for setting themselves up for success and once they graduate,” Wang said.
It’s not that everyone needs to become AI specialists, Wang added, but rather that workers should know how to use AI tools to become more efficient at whatever they’re doing.
“That’s where the kind of a battleground for talent is really shifting,” Wang said, “as differentiation in terms of talent comes from creative and effective ways to integrate AI into daily tasks.”
