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Tag: labor

  • Labor Department Won’t Release Full October Jobs Report, A Casualty Of The 43 Day Federal Shutdown – KXL

    WASHINGTON (AP) — The Labor Department said Wednesday that it will not be releasing a full jobs report for October because the 43-day federal government shutdown meant it couldn’t calculate the unemployment rate and some other key numbers.

    Instead, it will release some of the October jobs data — most importantly the number of jobs that employers created last month — along with the full November jobs report, now due a couple of weeks late on Dec. 16.

    The department’s “employment situation” report usually comes out the first Friday of the month.

    But the government shutdown disrupted data collection and delayed the release of the reports. For example, the September jobs report, now coming out Thursday, was originally due Oct. 3.

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    Grant McHill

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  • Sharp disagreements over economy threaten Federal Reserve interest rate cut

    WASHINGTON (AP) — What was once seen as a near-certain cut in interest rates next month now looks more like a coin flip as Federal Reserve officials sharply disagree over the economy’s health and whether stubborn inflation or weak hiring represent a bigger threat.

    In several speeches in the past week, some policymakers have registered greater concern over persistent inflation in an echo of the “affordability” concerns that played a large role in elections earlier this month.

    At the same time, another camp is much more concerned about meager hiring and the threat that the “low-hire, low-fire“ job market could worsen into one where layoffs become more widespread.

    The turmoil on the Fed’s 19-member interest-rate setting committee reflects a deeply uncertain economic outlook brought about by multiple factors, including tariffs, artificial intelligence, and changes in immigration and tax policies.

    “It’s reflective of a ton of uncertainty,” said Luke Tilley, chief economist at M&T Bank. “It’s not surprising at all that there’s a wide divergence of opinions.”

    Fewer rate cuts by the Fed could leave borrowing costs for homes and cars elevated. More expensive mortgages and auto loans contribute to the widespread view, according to polls, that the cost of living is too high.

    Some Fed watchers say that an unusually high number of dissents are possible at the December 9-10 meeting, regardless of whether the central bank reduces rates or not. Krishna Guha, an analyst at Evercore ISI, said a decision to cut could lead to as many as four or five dissents, while a decision to keep rates unchanged could produce three.

    Four dissenting votes would be highly unusual, given the Fed’s history of seeking consensus. The last time four officials dissented was in 1992, under then-Chair Alan Greenspan.

    Fed governor Christopher Waller on Monday noted that critics of the Fed often accuse it of “group think,” since many of its decisions are made unanimously.

    “People who are accusing us of this, get ready,” Waller said Monday in remarks in London. “You might see the least group think you’ve seen … in a long time.”

    The differences have been exacerbated by the government shutdown’s interruption of economic data, a particular challenge for a Fed that Chair Jerome Powell has often described as “data dependent.” The government’s last jobs report was for August, and inflation for September.

    September jobs data will finally be published Thursday, and are expected to show a small gain of 50,000 jobs that month and an unchanged unemployment rate at a still-low 4.3%.

    For now, Wall Street investors put the odds of a December rate cut at 50-50, according to CME Fedwatch, down sharply from nearly 94% a month ago. The decline has contributed to the stock market’s drops this week.

    After cutting their key rate in September for the first time this year, Fed policymakers signaled they expected to cut twice more, in October and December.

    But after implementing a second reduction Oct. 29, Powell poured cold water on the prospects of another cut, describing it as “not a foregone conclusion — far from it.”

    And speeches last week by a raft of regional Fed officials pushed the market odds of a December cut even lower. Susan Collins, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, said, “in all of my conversations with contacts across New England, I hear concerns about elevated prices.”

    Collins said that keeping the Fed’s key rate at its current level of about 3.9% would help bring inflation down. The economy “has been holding up quite well” even with interest rates where they are, she added.

    Several other regional presidents voiced similar concerns, including Raphael Bostic of the Atlanta Fed, Alberto Musalem of the St. Louis Fed, and Jeffrey Schmid at the Kansas City Fed. Musalem, Collins, and Schmid are among the 12 officials who vote on policy this year. Schmid dissented in October in favor of keeping rates unchanged.

    “When I talk to contacts in my district, I hear continued concern over the pace of price increases,” Schmid said Friday. “Some of this has to do with the effect of tariffs on input prices, but it is not just tariffs — or even primarily tariffs — that has people worried. I hear concerns about rising health care costs and insurance premiums, and I hear a lot about electricity.”

    On Monday, however, Waller argued that sluggish hiring is a bigger concern, and renewed his call for a rate cut next month.

    “The labor market is still weak and near stall speed,” he said. “Inflation through September continued to show relatively small effects from tariffs and support the hypothesis that tariffs … are not a persistent source of inflation.”

    Waller also dismissed the concern — voiced by Schmid and others — that the Fed should keep rates elevated because inflation has topped the Fed’s 2% target for five years. So far that hasn’t led the public to worry that inflation will stay elevated for an extended period, Waller noted.

    “You can’t just sort of say it’s been above target for five years, so I’m not going to cut,” he added. “You got to give us better answers than that.”

    There could be consensus for an interest rate cut if, say, new data for October and November show the economy shedding jobs, according to Esther George, the former president of the Kansas City Fed.

    It’s also worth noting that many economists had expected multiple dissents in September, but instead only Stephen Miran, a governor appointed that month by President Donald Trump, voted against the rate cut decision, in favor of an even bigger reduction.

    “Registering a dissent is a hard decision, and I think you’re going to find people that are speaking today that wouldn’t follow through with a vote in that direction,” she said. “I think you’re going to find enough consensus, whichever way they go.”

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  • Trump administration accelerates its plan to shut down the Education Department

    WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday accelerated the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education with a plan to transfer key, legally required functions to other agencies, including oversight of its $18-billion, core anti-poverty program, Title 1.

    Critics said the move was politicized and counterproductive and fear future program cuts. California Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said vital services to the state and nation’s most vulnerable students were likely to be disrupted.

    The steps move toward fulfilling a Trump campaign promise to eliminate the department, which some conservatives have long derided as wasteful, ineffective and unnecessary.

    “The Trump Administration is taking bold action to break up the federal education bureaucracy and return education to the states,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Cutting through layers of red tape in Washington is one essential piece of our final mission.”

    President Trump called for the department’s elimination in a March executive order. Both he and McMahon have spoken of a broad goal of sparking innovation through local control.

    Even before this effort, states provided about 90% of their own funding for education, but federal investment is still crucial, advocates say. In particular, the federal role has focused on ensuring services are provided for overlooked students and students with higher needs, such as those facing discrimination and poverty, and students with disabilities.

    While slashing the Education Department workforce, which Trump officials have characterized as a bloated bureaucracy, the president has adopted an interventionist agenda in education as well. He has threatened pulling federal funding if states and schools don’t follow his directives to combat antisemitism, clamp down on campus protests, end diversity, equity and inclusion programs and oppose expanded rights for transsexual students, among other issues in keeping with his agenda.

    The strategy behind the moves

    The key strategy announced Tuesday creates partnerships with other federal agencies, which will take on Education Department responsibilities. The department would retain legal authority even as the actual work shifts elsewhere.

    These partnerships are meant to sidestep federal rules — under the jurisdiction of Congress — that place programs, including Title I, specifically within the Education Department.

    Title I is expected to shift to the Department of Labor, which is likely to absorb an unknown number of education workers with the necessary experience and expertise. The long-term goal is to win buy-in from Congress — and then to eliminate the Education Department entirely, which requires congressional approval.

    “As we partner with these agencies to improve federal programs, we will continue to gather best practices in each state,” McMahon said.

    She also spoke of working “with Congress to codify these reforms,” an acknowledgment that the Department of Education was created by an act of Congress.

    Administration officials insist that their actions to date are legal, citing as precedent earlier agreements between federal agencies, including one example from the Biden administration. The scale of the current effort, however, is a much larger order of magnitude.

    Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Los Angeles) questioned Trump’s authority to take this action. “Not only is dismantling the education department without congressional approval illegal, but they chose today because they knew the Epstein vote would dominate the headlines. They clearly didn’t want the public to see what they were doing to our kids’ futures.”

    Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Assn., the nation’s largest teachers union, accused the administration of “taking every chance it can to hack away at the very protections and services our students need.”

    How the action affects vulnerable students

    The changes will complicate efforts to get money and services where they are needed, Thurmond said.

    “This is an unnecessary, disruptive change that is going to harm students, especially the most vulnerable,” Thurmond said. “It is clearly less efficient for state departments of education and local school districts to work with four different federal agencies instead of one.

    “Experience also tells us that any time you move expertise and responsibilities, you disrupt services. There is no way to avoid negative impacts on our children and our classrooms with a change of this magnitude.”

    But administration officials talked of new efficiencies and synergies, asserting that associating education with workforce development in the Department of Labor would make education more relevant to a student’s employment future.

    What happens to other programs?

    The Labor Department would oversee almost all grant programs that are now managed by the Education Department’s offices for K-12 and higher education. That includes funding pools for teacher training, English instruction and TRIO, a program that helps steer low-income students to college degrees.

    Tuesday’s action leaves in place the Education Department’s $1.6-trillion student loan portfolio and its funding for students with disabilities.

    But ultimately moving these programs seems likely if the mission remains to shutter the department.

    Another transfer puts Health and Human Services in charge of a grant program for parents who are attending college, along with management of foreign medical school accreditation. The State Department will take on foreign language programs. Interior will oversee programs for Native American education.

    Federal officials said states and schools should see no funding disruptions. Liz Huston, White House assistant press secretary, said Tuesday the administration “is fully committed to doing what’s best for American students, which is why it’s critical to shrink this bloated federal education bureaucracy while still ensuring efficient delivery of funds and essential programs.”

    The Education Department tested this approach in June, announcing the transfer of adult education programs to the Labor Department. Working out essential details took some five months, officials said Tuesday.

    The administration’s plan immediately drew support from Tim Walberg, a Republican who represents a southern Michigan district.

    “The past few decades have made one thing clear: The status quo is broken,” Walberg said. “As the bureaucracy swelled, left-wing bureaucrats were emboldened to waste taxpayer dollars on a radical agenda. As a result, our students have been left in the dust. Test scores are plummeting, students can’t read, and college graduates leave school burdened by debt rather than equipped with workforce-ready skills.”

    But the Education Department — and its central programs — has bipartisan support.

    One Republican expressing concern is Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick.

    “The United States Congress created the U.S. Department of Education for very good reason,” Fitzpatrick said. “And for millions of families, particularly those raising children with disabilities or living in low-income communities, the Department’s core offices are not discretionary functions. They are foundational. They safeguard civil rights, expand opportunity, and ensure that every child, in every community, has the chance to learn, grow, and succeed on equal footing.”

    Feds say programs’ funding will continue

    Department officials said programs will continue to be funded at levels set by Congress. But that doesn’t stop programs from running afoul of another portion of the Trump agenda. For example, the Tuesday announcement notes that a program to help with the education of the children of migrant workers will transfer to the Labor Department.

    However, on other fronts the Trump administration is trying to eliminate that program. The administration first tried to hold back funding approved by Congress. The administration relented under pressure. But the administration also cut funding for migrant education from its budget proposal for future years.

    Officials said they did not yet have details on whether the changes would bring further job cuts at the Education Department, which has been thinned by waves of layoffs and retirements under pressure.

    Blume is a Times staff writer. Binkley writes for the Associated Press. Times staff writers Daniel Miller and Michael Wilner contributed to this report.

    Howard Blume, Collin Binkley

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  • The economy survived the government shutdown — but all is not well

    The economy survived the government shutdown but all is not well

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  • Starbucks workers kick off 65-store US strike on company’s busy Red Cup Day

    More than 1,000 unionized Starbucks workers went on strike at 65 U.S. stores Thursday to protest a lack of progress in labor negotiations with the company.

    The strike was intended to disrupt Starbucks’ Red Cup Day, which is typically one of the company’s busiest days of the year. Since 2018, Starbucks has given out free, reusable cups on that day to customers who buy a holiday drink. Starbucks Workers United, the union organizing baristas, said Thursday morning that the strike had already closed some stores and was expected to force more to close later in the day.

    Starbucks Workers United said stores in 45 cities would be impacted, including New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Diego, St. Louis, Dallas, Columbus, Ohio, and Starbucks’ home city of Seattle. There is no date set for the strike to end, and more stores are prepared to join if Starbucks doesn’t reach a contract agreement with the union, organizers said.

    Starbucks emphasized that the vast majority of its U.S. stores would be open and operating as usual Thursday. The coffee giant has 10,000 company-owned stores in the U.S., as well as 7,000 licensed locations in places like grocery stores and airports.

    As of noon Thursday on the East Coast, Starbucks said it was on track to meet or exceed its sales expectations for the day at its company-owned stores.

    “The day is off to an incredible start,” the company said in a statement.

    Around 550 company-owned U.S. Starbucks stores are currently unionized. More have voted to unionize, but Starbucks closed 59 unionized stores in September as part of a larger reorganization campaign.

    Here’s what’s behind the strike.

    A stalled contract agreement

    Striking workers say they’re protesting because Starbucks has yet to reach a contract agreement with the union. Starbucks workers first voted to unionize at a store in Buffalo in 2021. In December 2023, Starbucks vowed to finalize an agreement by the end of 2024. But in August of last year, the company ousted Laxman Narasimhan, the CEO who made that promise. The union said progress has stalled under Brian Niccol, the company’s current chairman and CEO. The two sides haven’t been at the bargaining table since April.

    Workers want higher pay, better hours

    Workers say they’re seeking better hours and improved staffing in stores, where they say long customer wait times are routine. They also want higher pay, pointing out that executives like Niccol are making millions and the company spent $81 million in June on a conference in Las Vegas for 14,000 store managers and regional leaders.

    Dochi Spoltore, a barista from Pittsburgh, said in a union conference call Thursday that it’s hard for workers to be assigned more than 19 hours per week, which leaves them short of the 20 hours they would need to be eligible for Starbucks’ benefits. Spoltore said she makes $16 per hour.

    “I want Starbucks to succeed. My livelihood depends on it,” Spoltore said. “We’re proud of our work, but we’re tired of being treated like we’re disposable.”

    The union also wants the company to resolve hundreds of unfair labor practice charges filed by workers, who say the company has fired baristas in retaliation for unionizing and has failed to bargain over changes in policy that workers must enforce, like its decision earlier this year to limit restroom use to paying customers.

    Starbucks stands by its wages and benefits

    Starbucks says it offers the best wage and benefit package in retail, worth an average of $30 per hour. Among the company’s benefits are up to 18 weeks of paid family leave and 100% tuition coverage for a four-year college degree. In a letter to employees last week, Starbucks’ Chief Partner Officer Sara Kelly said the union walked away from the bargaining table in the spring.

    Kelly said some of the union’s proposals would significantly alter Starbucks’ operations, such as giving workers the ability to shut down mobile ordering if a store has more than five orders in the queue.

    Kelly said Starbucks remained ready to talk and “believes we can move quickly to a reasonable deal.” Kelly also said surveys showed that most employees like working for the company, and its barista turnover rates are half the industry average.

    Limited locations with high visibility

    Unionized workers have gone on strike at Starbucks before. In 2022 and 2023, workers walked off the job on Red Cup Day. Last year, a five-day strike ahead of Christmas closed 59 U.S. stores. Each time, Starbucks said the disruption to its operations was minimal. Starbucks Workers United said the new strike is open-ended and could spread to many more unionized locations.

    The number of non-union Starbucks locations dwarfs the number of unionized ones. But Todd Vachon, a union expert at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, said any strike could be highly visible and educate the public on baristas’ concerns.

    Unlike manufacturers, Vachon said, retail industries depend on the connection between their employees and their customers. That makes shaming a potentially powerful weapon in the union’s arsenal, he said.

    Improving sales

    Starbucks’ same-store sales, or sales at locations open at least a year, rose 1% in the July-September period. It was the first time in nearly two years that the company had posted an increase. In his first year at the company, Niccol set new hospitality standards, redesigned stores to be cozier and more welcoming, and adjusted staffing levels to better handle peak hours.

    Starbucks also is trying to prioritize in-store orders over mobile ones. Last week, the company’s holiday drink rollout in the U.S. was so successful that it almost immediately sold out of its glass Bearista cup. Starbucks said demand for the cup exceeded its expectations, but it wouldn’t say if the Bearista will return before the holidays are over.

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  • Workers turn to ‘polyworking’ to combat frozen salaries and inflation

    NEW YORK (AP) — As workers face frozen salaries, inflation and fear of layoffs, some have decided to branch out from their traditional careers. They’re taking on side jobs to bring in additional income and provide a backup plan should they find themselves out of work, or adding second, third and sometimes fourth jobs — what some call “polyworking” — to the mix.

    Take Katelyn Cusick, 29. She beautifies displays as a visual merchandiser for Patagonia at her full-time job. Then she works a side gig managing social media influencers for a German shoe brand for 10 to 15 hours per week. She also has an Etsy shop where she sells paintings. If that wasn’t enough, she ushers at concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area — a way to see live shows for free.

    “Every day is different and every day feels like a new day,” Cusick said. “That is ultimately why I started doing all these side hustles, just because I wanted to switch it up. I don’t want to just do the same thing every day.”

    The extra income also helps her pay her student loans and manage the high cost of living, a welcome assist since wages at her full-time job have stayed flat for several years, she said.

    Some are drawn to side jobs because of instability in their workplace, or the perception that they may lose their income. Still others, reluctant to trust one employer to provide a steady job that lasts, are supplementing their main roles with gig work on apps such as Uber and Grubhub.

    This article is part of AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health. Read more Be Well.

    “We have seen stagnant salaries, we’ve seen inflation, we’ve seen the cost of living overall increasing, even beyond our inflation measures,” said Alexandrea Ravenelle, sociologist and gig economy researcher at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “So people are looking for ways to supplement and to build themselves a little bit of a safety net.”

    Some are creating “portfolio careers” where they work a variety of jobs, each building different valuable skills. In Cusick’s case, side work keeps her social media marketing skills current.

    “Rather than having one job that you can have for many, many years and thinking about your career progression as a linear pathway, some people are putting together multiple side hustles based on their skills and interests and making the money work by having multiple revenue streams,” said Elaine Chen, director of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts University.

    Career experts and those with side jobs share tips on how to get started and what to avoid if you’re considering branching out from your 9-to-5.

    Follow a passion

    If you’re embarking on a side business on top of a full-time job, consider picking something you’re naturally interested in, since you’ll spend a lot of free time on the venture.

    “You have to love it,” Chen said. “Usually it is something that the person is really passionate about.”

    For Josie White, 31, that passion was mental health. After struggling with schizoaffective disorder and finding effective treatment, she wanted to help others who have mental health challenges feel less alone.

    While working full-time as a fundraiser for Shelter the Homeless, a nonprofit organization in Salt Lake City, White decided to pursue public speaking on the side and began looking for opportunities to address groups and conferences where she could share her own experiences with mental illness “to reassure people that there is hope and a light at the end of the tunnel.”

    Be realistic about money

    Launching a side hustle may require initial investment, and it can take a considerable amount of time before it generates income.

    When White started her side business, she began by offering her speaking services as an unpaid volunteer. She landed some gigs training nonprofit staff and speaking about fundraising, which wasn’t her original goal, but those opportunities helped her gain experience.

    Over the past year she’s booked 10 speaking engagements, and four of those will be paid, she said. She’s taken the money she earned so far and re-invested it into developing her public speaking skills.

    “The goal is ultimately to get paid, but right now I’m putting in the legwork to reach that,” White said. “It’s starting to snowball.”

    Know the risks of gig work

    Some side jobs, such as gig work delivering groceries or driving passengers, may generate income right away.

    Tom Ritter of Syracuse, New York, was supplementing his income as a workforce management specialist at a nonprofit by making deliveries for Instacart and Spark, Walmart’s delivery platform, on top of his full-time job. The side work helped him pay his bills, especially when he recently lost his day job.

    “For me, even that extra couple hundred dollars a month went a long way, and it still does,” Ritter, 39, said.

    Ravenelle cautioned against relying too heavily on gig work for income. It can be hard to transition back to full-time, permanent jobs, where workers typically wait two weeks or more for a first paycheck, and gig work carries a stigma among some employers, she said.

    Plus, if gig workers are earning good wages, the platforms will typically change the algorithms so they earn less money, Ravenelle said. “The house always wins when it comes to the gig platforms,” she said.

    Be skeptical

    Once people are looking for side jobs, they should be cautious if an opportunity found online seems too good to be true. Some online influencers promote business ideas that are more akin to scams.

    In Ravanelle’s research she’s spoken with people who saw online videos about making money selling microgreens.

    “They thought they could make thousands of dollars a month, working from home, growing microgreens in their kitchen, and then selling them to high-end restaurants,” Ravenelle said. “No. The person who sells you the grow lights and gives you the classes is the person who’s making the money.”

    Finding the time

    Starting a second job or career can dig into personal time, reducing opportunities to exercise or be with family and friends.

    White works Monday through Thursday at Shelter the Homeless, clocking 40 to 45 hours per week. With Fridays off, she spends that day practicing speaking skills or generating new business.

    “I wouldn’t describe my life as balanced,” she said. “But am I enjoying it? Yes. And I think that matters.”

    ___

    Share your stories and questions about workplace wellness at [email protected]. Follow AP’s Be Well coverage, focusing on wellness, fitness, diet and mental health at https://apnews.com/hub/be-well

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  • Government will release September jobs report next week

    WASHINGTON — The Labor Department will release its numbers on September hiring and unemployment next Thursday, a month and a half late, marking the beginning of the end of a data drought caused by the 43-day federal government shutdown.

    The statistical blackout meant that the Federal Reserve, businesses, policymakers and investors have largely been in the dark about inflation, job creation, GDP growth and other measures of the U.S. economic health since late summer.

    Thomas Simons and Michael Bacolas at Jefferies, a financial firm, wrote in a commentary Friday that over 30 reports from the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis and Census Bureau were delayed by the political standoff.

    The Labor Department did not release its weekly report on the number of Americans signing up for unemployment benefits for seven straight weeks. That jobless claims report is seen as a potential early indicator of where the labor market is headed.

    The Labor Department did release its consumer price index for September — the most popular measurement of inflation — nine days late on Oct. 24. The government made an exception for that report because of its urgency: It is used to calculate the annual cost of living adjustment for tens of millions of Americans receiving Social Security and other federal benefits.

    The interruption of federal economic statistics came at an awkward time. President Donald Trump’s policies — sweeping, ever-changing import taxes and massive deportations of people working in the United States illegally — are creating uncertainty about the economic outlook.

    And the economy has sent conflicting signals: Economic growth looked solid at midyear and unemployment has been low. But job growth has lost momentum, and inflation has remained stubbornly above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target, partly because of the impact of Trump’s tariffs.

    Jefferies’ Simons expects the September employment report to show that employers added 65,000 jobs that month — unimpressive, but up from a meager 22,000 in August. He figures that unemployment remained at a low 4.3%.

    The data cutoff has caused consternation on Wall Street and deepened divisions among Fed officials over whether to cut interest rates for a third straight time at their next meeting in December.

    This week, some Fed policymakers have suggested that a lack of data is one reason they may support holding off on another rate cut.

    As a result, fresh reports on jobs and inflation in the coming weeks and months will carry huge weight at the Fed because new numbers could help resolve disagreements between those who support another interest rate reduction and those who are opposed.

    Even with the government reopened, however, it could take a few more weeks for the data to fully recover. Earlier this week, Kevin Hassett, a top White House economist, said only a part of October’s jobs report — originally scheduled to be released Nov. 7 — will eventually be released.

    The Bureau of Labor Statistics will likely have enough data from businesses to calculate how many jobs were gained or lost last month. Much of that is submitted electronically. But a separate survey of households, which is used to calculate the unemployment rate, didn’t take place during the shutdown.

    As a result, for the first time in 77 years, the BLS may not calculate an unemployment rate for the month of October.

    Other White House officials have previously said there also won’t be an October inflation report, because the data couldn’t be gathered due to the government shutdown. That will pose a challenge for the Fed, which is seeking to determine whether inflation is headed back to 2%.

    The data interruption occurred just a couple of months after Trump fired the director of the BLS, Erika McEntarfer, after it produced employment figures Aug. 1 that he didn’t like. They showed only modest job gains in July and sharply smaller increases in May and June than previously estimated.

    Still, economists said the upcoming reports should be free from bias. Currently, there are no political appointees at the agency, after Trump withdrew his nominee to head the BLS Sept. 30.

    “The data are being produced by roughly the same set of people as in the past,” Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute, said.

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  • Starbucks workers kick off 65-store US strike on company’s busy Red Cup Day

    More than 1,000 unionized Starbucks workers plan to strike at 65 U.S. stores Thursday to protest a lack of progress in labor negotiations with the company.

    The strike was intended to disrupt Starbucks’ Red Cup Day, which is typically one of the company’s busiest days of the year. Since 2018, Starbucks has given out free, reusable cups on that day to customers who buy a holiday drink.

    Starbucks Workers United, the union organizing Starbucks baristas, said stores in 45 cities would be impacted, including New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Diego, St. Louis, Dallas, Columbus, Ohio, and Starbucks’ home city of Seattle. There is no date set for the strike to end, and more stores are prepared to join if Starbucks doesn’t reach a contract agreement with the union, organizers said.

    Starbucks emphasized that the vast majority of its U.S. stores would be open and operating as usual Thursday. The coffee giant has 10,000 company-owned stores in the U.S., as well as 7,000 licensed locations in places like grocery stores and airports.

    Around 550 company-owned U.S. Starbucks stores are currently unionized. More have voted to unionize, but Starbucks closed 59 unionized stores in September as part of a larger reorganization campaign.

    Here’s what’s behind the strike.

    Striking workers say they’re protesting because Starbucks has yet to reach a contract agreement with the union. Starbucks workers first voted to unionize at a store in Buffalo in 2021. In December 2023, Starbucks vowed to finalize an agreement by the end of 2024. But in August of last year, the company ousted Laxman Narasimhan, the CEO who made that promise. The union said progress has stalled under Brian Niccol, the company’s current chairman and CEO.

    Workers say they’re seeking better hours and improved staffing in stores, where they say long customer wait times are routine. They say too many workers aren’t getting the required 20 hours per week they need before Starbucks’ benefits kick in. They also want higher pay, pointing out that executives like Niccol are making millions.

    The union also wants the company to resolve hundreds of unfair labor practice charges filed by workers, who say the company has fired baristas in retaliation for unionizing and has failed to bargain over changes in policy that workers must enforce, like its decision earlier this year to limit restroom use to paying customers.

    Starbucks says it offers the best wage and benefit package in retail, worth an average of $30 per hour. Among the company’s benefits are up to 18 weeks of paid family leave and 100% tuition coverage for a four-year college degree. In a letter to employees last week, Starbucks’ Chief Partner Officer Sara Kelly said the union walked away from the bargaining table in the spring.

    Kelly said Starbucks remained ready to talk and “believes we can move quickly to a reasonable deal.” Kelly also said surveys showed that most employees like working for the company, and its barista turnover rates are half the industry average.

    Unionized workers have gone on strike at Starbucks before. In 2022 and 2023, workers walked off the job on Red Cup Day. Last year, a five-day strike ahead of Christmas closed 59 U.S. stores. Each time, Starbucks said the disruption to its operations was minimal. Starbucks United said the new strike is open-ended and could spread to many more unionized locations.

    The number of non-union Starbucks locations dwarfs the number of unionized ones. But Todd Vachon, a union expert at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, said any strike could be highly visible and educate the public on baristas’ concerns.

    Unlike manufacturers, Vachon said, retail industries depend on the connection between their employees and their customers. That makes shaming a potentially powerful weapon in the union’s arsenal, he said.

    Starbucks’ same-store sales, or sales at locations open at least a year, rose 1% in the July-September period. It was the first time in nearly two years that the company had posted an increase. In his first year at the company, Niccol set new hospitality standards, redesigned stores to be cozier and more welcoming, and adjusted staffing levels to better handle peak hours.

    Starbucks also is trying to prioritize in-store orders over mobile ones. Last week, the company’s holiday drink rollout in the U.S. was so successful that it almost immediately sold out of its glass Bearista cup. Starbucks said demand for the cup exceeded its expectations, but it wouldn’t say if the Bearista will return before the holidays are over.

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  • 2 Federal Reserve officials oppose an interest rate cut in December

    WASHINGTON — Two Federal Reserve officials expressed opposition Wednesday to another interest rate cut at the central bank’s next meeting in December, further muddying the outlook for the Fed’s next steps.

    The remarks by Susan Collins, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Raphael Bostic, president of the Atlanta Fed, suggest that the central bank’s rate-setting committee could be tilting against what had been an expected third straight cut next month.

    The officials cited several reasons for keeping rates unchanged, after a reduction in September and in October. They argued that inflation is stubbornly elevated and has been above the Fed’s 2% target for nearly five years, while the economy is resilient and doesn’t appear to need more rate cuts. The job market is stumbling, with hiring nearly at a standstill, but layoffs still seem muted, they said.

    Another factor has been the government shutdown, which has cut off the economic data the Fed relies on to discern the economy’s path. On Wednesday White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that the jobs and inflation reports for October would likely never be released.

    “Formulating an economic outlook is challenging — and the limited data compounds the difficulty,” Collins said in a speech in Boston.

    “It will likely be appropriate to keep policy rates at the current level for some time … in this highly uncertain environment,” she added.

    That is a shift from her previous speech in October, when she expressed support for at least one more rate cut.

    Earlier Wednesday, Bostic said he remains concerned inflation is too high, and added that, “I … favor keeping the funds rate steady until we see clear evidence that inflation is again moving meaningfully toward its 2% target.” Bostic said earlier Wednesday that he will retire when his current term ends on Feb. 28, 2026.

    Their remarks come at an unusually challenging time for the Fed, with the economy facing both weak hiring and elevated inflation. Typically, the Fed would reduce its rate to encourage borrowing, spending and job gains, while it would keep it unchanged — or even raise it — to combat inflation.

    The 19 officials on the Fed’s rate-setting committee narrowly supported three rate cuts this year at their September meeting, but Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference late last month that the committee remains divided and another cut in December was not a “foregone conclusion.”

    David Seif, chief economist for developed markets at Nomura Securities, expects the Fed will skip a rate cut in December and won’t reduce borrowing costs again until March.

    “There is a large segment of the Fed that is uncomfortable with a December cut,” Seif said.

    Collins also said that additional reductions to the Fed’s rate could, by boosting the economy, accelerate inflation.

    “Absent evidence of a notable labor market deterioration, I would be hesitant to ease policy further, especially given the limited information on inflation due to the government shutdown,” she said.

    Bostic, meanwhile, said the Atlanta Fed’s surveys of businesses show that many companies intend to raise prices next year, a sign that inflation may not cool anytime soon.

    “We cannot breezily assume inflationary pressures will quickly dissipate after a one-time bump in prices from new import duties,” Bostic said, referring to President Donald Trump’s tariffs. “Across all our information sources, I see little to no evidence that we should be sanguine about the forward trajectory of inflation.”

    Some Fed officials, such as Fed governor Stephen Miran, have argued that the tariffs will only temporarily lift prices and outside those one-time increases, inflation is cooling.

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  • China rolls out its version of the H-1B visa to attract foreign tech workers

    HONG KONG (AP) — Vaishnavi Srinivasagopalan, a skilled Indian IT professional who has worked in both India and the U.S., has been looking for work in China. Beijing’s new K-visa program targeting science and technology workers could turn that dream into a reality.

    The K-visa rolled out by Beijing last month is part of China’s widening effort to catch up with the U.S. in the race for global talent and cutting edge technology. It coincides with uncertainties over the U.S.’s H-1B program under tightened immigrations policies implemented by President Donald Trump.

    “(The) K-visa for China (is) an equivalent to the H-1B for the U.S.,” said Srinivasagopalan, who is intrigued by China’s working environment and culture after her father worked at a Chinese university a few years back. “It is a good option for people like me to work abroad.”

    The K-visa supplements China’s existing visa schemes including the R-visa for foreign professionals, but with loosened requirements, such as not requiring an applicant to have a job offer before applying.

    Stricter U.S. policies toward foreign students and scholars under Trump, including the raising of fees for the H-1B visa for foreign skilled workers to $100,000 for new applicants, are leading some non-American professionals and students to consider going elsewhere.

    “Students studying in the U.S. hoped for an (H-1B) visa, but currently this is an issue,” said Bikash Kali Das, an Indian masters student of international relations at Sichuan University in China.

    China wants more foreign tech professionals

    China is striking while the iron is hot.

    The ruling Communist Party has made global leadership in advanced technologies a top priority, paying massive government subsidies to support research and development of areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors and robotics.

    “Beijing perceives the tightening of immigration policies in the U.S. as an opportunity to position itself globally as welcoming foreign talent and investment more broadly,” said Barbara Kelemen, associate director and head of Asia at security intelligence firm Dragonfly.

    Unemployment among Chinese graduates remains high, and competition is intense for jobs in scientific and technical fields. But there is a skills gap China’s leadership is eager to fill. For decades, China has been losing top talent to developed countries as many stayed and worked in the U.S. and Europe after they finished studies there.

    The brain drain has not fully reversed.

    Many Chinese parents still see Western education as advanced and are eager to send their children abroad, said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

    Still, in recent years, a growing number of professionals including AI experts, scientists and engineers have moved to China from the U.S., including Chinese-Americans. Fei Su, a chip architect at Intel, and Ming Zhou, a leading engineer at U.S.-based software firm Altair, were among those who have taken teaching jobs in China this year.

    Many skilled workers in India and Southeast Asia have already expressed interest about the K-visa, said Edward Hu, a Shanghai-based immigration director at the consultancy Newland Chase.

    Questions about extra competition from foreign workers

    With the jobless rate for Chinese aged 16-24 excluding students at nearly 18%, the campaign to attract more foreign professionals is raising questions.

    “The current job market is already under fierce competition,” said Zhou Xinying, a 24-year-old postgraduate student in behavioral science at eastern China’s Zhejiang University.

    While foreign professionals could help “bring about new technologies” and different international perspectives, Zhou said, “some Chinese young job seekers may feel pressure due to the introduction of the K-visa policy.”

    Kyle Huang, a 26-year-old software engineer based in the southern city of Guangzhou, said his peers in the science and technology fields fear the new visa scheme “might threaten local job opportunities”.

    A recent commentary published by a state-backed news outlet, the Shanghai Observer, downplayed such concerns, saying that bringing in such foreign professionals will benefit the economy. As China advances in areas such as AI and cutting-edge semiconductors, there is a “gap and mismatch” between qualified jobseekers and the demand for skilled workers, it said.

    “The more complex the global environment, the more China will open its arms,” it said.

    “Beijing will need to emphasize how select foreign talent can create, not take, local jobs,” said Michael Feller, chief strategist at consultancy Geopolitical Strategy. “But even Washington has shown that this is politically a hard argument to make, despite decades of evidence.”

    China’s disadvantages even with the new visas

    Recruitment and immigration specialists say foreign workers face various hurdles in China. One is the language barrier. The ruling Communist Party’s internet censorship, known as the “Great Firewall,” is another drawback.

    A country of about 1.4 billion, China had only an estimated 711,000 foreign workers residing in the country as of 2023.

    The U.S. still leads in research and has the advantage of using English widely. There’s also still a relatively clearer pathway to residency for many, said David Stepat, country director for Singapore at the consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates.

    Nikhil Swaminathan, an Indian H1-B visa holder working for a U.S. non-profit organization after finishing graduate school there, is interested in China’s K-visa but skeptical. “I would’ve considered it. China’s a great place to work in tech, if not for the difficult relationship between India and China,” he said.

    Given a choice, many jobseekers still are likely to aim for jobs in leading global companies outside China.

    “The U.S. is probably more at risk of losing would-be H-1B applicants to other Western economies, including the UK and European Union, than to China,” said Feller at Geopolitical Strategy.

    “The U.S. may be sabotaging itself, but it’s doing so from a far more competitive position in terms of its attractiveness to talent,” Feller said. “China will need to do far more than offer convenient visa pathways to attract the best.”

    ___

    AP writer Fu Ting in Washington and researchers Yu Bing and Shihuan Chen in Beijing contributed.

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  • Meet the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, who skipped finals to make an empire out of teaching AI ‘what only humans know’ | Fortune

    In the spring of 2023, while his classmates at Georgetown were cramming for finals, Brendan Foody was busy testing out his new theory of work.

    “I knew I wanted to drop out before finals my sophomore year,” he told Fortune. “I just didn’t go to finals.”

    By then, Foody had already found something he couldn’t learn in a lecture hall. A few months earlier, at a hackathon in São Paulo, he and his co-founders had stumbled onto a simple but powerful model: match companies with skilled engineers abroad, handle the logistics, and take a small cut of each deal. Their first client agreed to pay $500 a week for a developer; Mercor paid the engineer roughly 70% and kept the rest as a service fee.

    What began as a way to connect talent soon evolved into something more ambitious: a marketplace where humans could help train the AI systems that might one day replace them. Mercor now hires professionals—consultants, lawyers, bankers, and doctors—to create “evals” and rubrics that test and refine models’ reasoning.

    “Everyone’s been focused on what models can do,” Foody said. “But the real opportunity is teaching them what only humans know—judgment, nuance, and taste.”

    Within nine months, he and his co-founders—high school friends and debate teammates Adarsh Hiremath and Surya Midha—had turned that fledgling idea into a company with a $1 million revenue run rate. The trio’s early success was less a fluke than a proof of concept: that the same structured reasoning they once practiced on the debate circuit could be codified to teach machines how to think.

    Two years later, Mercor has become a $10 billion company, turning the trio into the world’s youngest self-made billionaires. The product of that São Paulo experiment had transformed into one of the fastest-scaling startups of the AI era, attracting major investors who view it as a linchpin in the future of human-in-the-loop automation.

    To Foody, the leap from college dropout to billionaire founder was rational.

    “When I was in college, work was something I had to be disciplined to do,” he said. “When I started Mercor, it became something I couldn’t stop thinking about.”

    Foody still hasn’t taken a day off in three years. He says even when he’s at the dinner table with his parents, he thinks about work, which, to him, doesn’t feel like work. 

    “People burn out when they work hard on things that don’t feel compounding,” he explained. “I see the ROI of my time every day.”

    That mindset has become the philosophical core of Mercor’s mission. In Foody’s view, AI isn’t eliminating labor: it’s reallocating it. As software automates repetitive white-collar tasks, humans will move up the value chain, teaching machines how to reason, decide, and create. 

    “It’s like we have this bottleneck of only so much human labor in the economy,” he said. “That shape is going to change radically over the next decade.”

    How is Mercor alleviating the bottleneck? Its platform allows enterprises to commission thousands of micro-tasks that measure model performance in real professional contexts: writing a financial memo, drafting a legal brief, or analyzing a medical chart. Human evaluators grade each output against detailed rubrics, feeding structured feedback back into the model. Every evaluation helps AI learn how people make decisions, and how they measure quality.

    At the center of that system is APEX—the AI Productivity Index, Mercor’s proprietary benchmark for assessing how well AI performs economically valuable work. Rather than test abstract reasoning or mathematical puzzles, APEX evaluates large models on 200 tasks drawn from the workflows of investment bankers, lawyers, consultants, and physicians. To build it, Mercor enlisted a heavyweight advisory group that includes former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, ex-McKinsey managing partner Dominic Barton, legal scholar Cass Sunstein, and cardiologist Eric Topol. Each helped design the evaluation rubrics and case structures to mirror the realities of high-stakes professional labor.

    As the company puts it: “It’s great to have 10,000 PhDs in your pocket—it’s even better to have a model that can reliably do your taxes.”

    The implications of Mercor’s success are sweeping. In Foody’s eyes, this new labor market could employ millions of people globally while accelerating AI progress. 

    “We’ll automate maybe two-thirds of knowledge work,” he said. “And that’ll be incredible, because it lets us do things like cure cancer and go to Mars.”

    For investors, Mercor’s growth story is irresistible. It sits at the intersection of two seismic shifts: the mainstreaming of AI and the rise of flexible, project-based work. Each corporate client adds new evaluators, and each evaluator helps refine more models, creating a flywheel of both data and demand. 

    “We have one of the fastest revenue ramps of any company in history,” Foody said matter-of-factly.

    Foody likes to describe it as the next industrial revolution. He knows people are afraid of being replaced by AI, and constantly fields questions on the ethics of training AI to replace jobs. Foody argues we ought to just bite the bullet. 

    “It’s easy to fall into a Luddite mindset and see productivity gains as bad because they cause short-term job losses,” Foody said. “But every major technical revolution has ultimately made life better.”

    After the industrial revolution, the economy went from 75% of Americans working as farmers to about 1%, and that freed people to do everything else, Foody said. 

    “The challenge now is to be thoughtful about what comes next: the higher, better things humans will spend time on,” Foody said, “and how quickly we can help make that future real.”

    Eva Roytburg

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  • Washington’s struggling economy takes another economic hit from the government shutdown

    WASHINGTON — With the combination of the longest government shutdown, the mass firings of government workers and a fresh cut in federal food aid, the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington is bracing for the swell of people who will need its help before the holiday season.

    The food bank, which serves 400 pantries and aid organizations in the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and two Maryland counties, is providing 8 million more meals than it had prepared to this budget year — a nearly 20% increase.

    The city is being hit “especially hard,” said Radha Muthiah, the group’s CEO and president, “because of the sequence of events that has occurred over the course of this year.”

    The nation’s capital has been battered by a series of decisions by the Trump administration, from the layoffs of federal workers to the ongoing law enforcement intervention into the district. The added blow of the shutdown, which has furloughed workers and paused money for food assistance, is only deepening the economic toll.

    The latest figures from the D.C. Office of Revenue Analysis do not account for workforce changes since the shutdown that began Oct. 1. But even the September jobs report shows that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate hovers at 6%, compared with the most recent national rate of 4.3%, and has been the highest in the nation for months.

    The economic woes appear to be reverberating politically. Democrat Abigail Spanberger won election Tuesday as Virginia’s governor after focusing her campaign message on the effects of President Donald Trump’s actions on the state’s economy.

    The shutdown’s long-term impact on the regional economy will be felt long after the government reopens, experts say.

    Washington has the country’s largest share of federal workers — about 20%, according to official figures — and roughly 150,000 federal employees call the area home. By Monday, hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the country will have missed at least two full paychecks because of the shutdown. Nationally, at least 670,000 federal employees are furloughed, while about 730,000 are working without pay, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    During the shutdown, the number of federal employees on Washington’s transit system each weekday has dropped by about one-quarter compared with ridership in September. Eateries that the Restaurant Association of Greater Washington says were already dealing with thin margins from seasonal declines and the fallout from Trump’s deployment of armed National Guard members on city streets are facing more challenges at a time when owners had hoped for a rebound.

    Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at Brookings Metro, a think tank, said that going without paychecks is causing significant cash flow issues for federal workers, potentially leading to defaults on mortgages and student loans. For local businesses, especially those reliant on federal workers’ discretionary spending, it could exacerbate the impact during the high-sales October-December quarter.

    “A lot of businesses rely on higher spending in Q4 in order to have a revenue positive year,” Loh said.

    Small businesses are feeling the loss of that spending.

    The crowd watching Liverpool’s Premier League game last weekend would have been standing room only at The Queen Vic, a bar in Northeast Washington. But that was not the case, said Ryan Gordon, co-owner of the British pub.

    “We still had seats for people, which means the bars around us who get our overflow got nothing,” Gordon said.

    Business is down about 50% compared with what it was before the shutdown, he said. He considers himself lucky in the local restaurant scene because he owns the building and does not have to pay rent.

    “To the extent to which discretionary spending by D.C. area households is limited, that could push a lot of local businesses into the red,” Loh said. The culmination of the shutdown, cut in SNAP benefits and layoffs are weighing heavy on households that have never sought help before, she added.

    Thea Price was fired from her job at the U.S. Institute of Peace in March of this year, part of the wave of layoffs meant to shrink the size of the federal government. Her husband, a government contractor, also lost his job at a museum. Since then, they have lived on savings, Medicaid and SNAP.

    Price, 37, recently went to a food pantry in Arlington, Virginia, for the first time recently. The shutdown halted funding for SNAP, after it took her months to get it, and the $500 payments she receives each month were set to stop. Virginia sent a partial payment but it was not enough, Price said. With her options to sustain herself and her family running out, Price is moving back to her hometown in the Seattle area.

    “We can’t afford to stay in the area any longer and hope that something might pan out,” she said. “We’re just in a much different place than when these things started in March.”

    At the Capital Area Food Bank in Northeast Washington, forklifts sped around in a controlled chaos, unloading trucks, moving food and preparing for a distribution set up for federal employees and contractors, and preparations are intensifying with the holiday season in mind. The organization is expecting to provide 1 million more meals this month than it had anticipated before the shutdown.

    “We’re very focused obviously on the immediacy of all of these impacts today and getting food to those who need it,” said Muthiah, the group’s director. But she cautioned there were long-term implications to the unfolding crisis, with people tapping their savings and retirement funds to get by.

    “People are borrowing against their futures to be able to pay for basic necessities today,” she said.

    ___

    Associated Press video journalist Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.

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  • Washington’s Struggling Economy Takes Another Economic Hit From the Government Shutdown

    The food bank, which serves 400 pantries and aid organizations in the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and two Maryland counties, is providing 8 million more meals than it had prepared to this budget year — a nearly 20% increase.

    The city is being hit “especially hard,” said Radha Muthiah, the group’s CEO and president, “because of the sequence of events that has occurred over the course of this year.”

    The latest figures from the D.C. Office of Revenue Analysis do not account for workforce changes since the shutdown that began Oct. 1. But even the September jobs report shows that the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate hovers at 6%, compared with the most recent national rate of 4.3%, and has been the highest in the nation for months.

    The economic woes appear to be reverberating politically. Democrat Abigail Spanberger won election Tuesday as Virginia’s governor after focusing her campaign message on the effects of President Donald Trump’s actions on the state’s economy.

    The shutdown’s long-term impact on the regional economy will be felt long after the government reopens, experts say.


    Local businesses feeling the crunch

    Washington has the country’s largest share of federal workers — about 20%, according to official figures — and roughly 150,000 federal employees call the area home. By Monday, hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the country will have missed at least two full paychecks because of the shutdown. Nationally, at least 670,000 federal employees are furloughed, while about 730,000 are working without pay, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

    During the shutdown, the number of federal employees on Washington’s transit system each weekday has dropped by about one-quarter compared with ridership in September. Eateries that the Restaurant Association of Greater Washington says were already dealing with thin margins from seasonal declines and the fallout from Trump’s deployment of armed National Guard members on city streets are facing more challenges at a time when owners had hoped for a rebound.

    Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at Brookings Metro, a think tank, said that going without paychecks is causing significant cash flow issues for federal workers, potentially leading to defaults on mortgages and student loans. For local businesses, especially those reliant on federal workers’ discretionary spending, it could exacerbate the impact during the high-sales October-December quarter.

    “A lot of businesses rely on higher spending in Q4 in order to have a revenue positive year,” Loh said.

    Small businesses are feeling the loss of that spending.

    The crowd watching Liverpool’s Premier League game last weekend would have been standing room only at The Queen Vic, a bar in Northeast Washington. But that was not the case, said Ryan Gordon, co-owner of the British pub.

    “We still had seats for people, which means the bars around us who get our overflow got nothing,” Gordon said.

    Business is down about 50% compared with what it was before the shutdown, he said. He considers himself lucky in the local restaurant scene because he owns the building and does not have to pay rent.

    “To the extent to which discretionary spending by D.C. area households is limited, that could push a lot of local businesses into the red,” Loh said. The culmination of the shutdown, cut in SNAP benefits and layoffs are weighing heavy on households that have never sought help before, she added.


    A family gets squeezed out of the region

    Thea Price was fired from her job at the U.S. Institute of Peace in March of this year, part of the wave of layoffs meant to shrink the size of the federal government. Her husband, a government contractor, also lost his job at a museum. Since then, they have lived on savings, Medicaid and SNAP.

    Price, 37, recently went to a food pantry in Arlington, Virginia, for the first time recently. The shutdown halted funding for SNAP, after it took her months to get it, and the $500 payments she receives each month were set to stop. Virginia sent a partial payment but it was not enough, Price said. With her options to sustain herself and her family running out, Price is moving back to her hometown in the Seattle area.

    “We can’t afford to stay in the area any longer and hope that something might pan out,” she said. “We’re just in a much different place than when these things started in March.”

    At the Capital Area Food Bank in Northeast Washington, forklifts sped around in a controlled chaos, unloading trucks, moving food and preparing for a distribution set up for federal employees and contractors, and preparations are intensifying with the holiday season in mind. The organization is expecting to provide 1 million more meals this month than it had anticipated before the shutdown.

    “We’re very focused obviously on the immediacy of all of these impacts today and getting food to those who need it,” said Muthiah, the group’s director. But she cautioned there were long-term implications to the unfolding crisis, with people tapping their savings and retirement funds to get by.

    “People are borrowing against their futures to be able to pay for basic necessities today,” she said.

    Associated Press video journalist Nathan Ellgren contributed to this report.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

    Associated Press

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  • South Korean solar firm cuts pay and hours for Georgia workers as US officials detain imports

    A South Korean solar company says it will temporarily reduce pay and working hours for about 1,000 of its 3,000 employees in Georgia because U.S. customs officials have been detaining imported components for solar panels

    ATLANTA — A South Korean solar company says it will temporarily reduce pay and working hours for about 1,000 of its 3,000 employees in Georgia because U.S. customs officials have been detaining imported components needed to make solar panels.

    Qcells, a unit of South Korea’s Hanwha Solutions, said Friday that it will also lay off 300 workers from staffing agencies at its plants in Dalton and Cartersville, both northwest of Atlanta.

    The company says U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been detaining imported components at ports on suspicion that they contain materials that may have been made with forced labor in China, meaning it can’t run its solar panel assembly lines at full strength.

    Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced in August that her department was stepping up enforcement of the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a 2021 law that restricts Chinese goods made with forced labor from entering the U.S. Published reports indicate that U.S. officials began detaining solar cells made by Qcells in June. A spokesperson for Customs and Border Protection couldn’t immediately answer questions about Qcells on Friday.

    Qcells says none of its materials or components are made with forced labor or even come from China. Spokesperson Marta Stoepker said the company maintains “robust supply chain due diligence measures” and “very detailed documentation,” which has been successful in getting some shipments released.

    “Our latest supply chain is sourced completely outside of China and our legacy supply chains contain no material from Xinjiang province based on third party audits and supplier guarantees,” Stoepker said.

    She said Qcells is continuing to cooperate and expects to resume full production in the coming weeks and months.

    “Although our supply chain operations are beginning to normalize, today we shared with our employees that HR actions must be taken to improve operational efficiency until production capacity returns to normal levels,” Stoepker said in a statement.

    Qcells has said it pays workers an average of about $53,000 a year. Workers will retain full benefits during furloughs.

    Qcells is completing a $2.3 billion plant in Cartersville that will let it take polysilicon refined in Washington state and make ingots, wafers and solar cells — the building blocks of finished solar modules. That will allow it to reduce imports of solar modules. The company has said it will finish the plant even though President Donald Trump and the Republican Congress dismantled most of the tax credits for buying solar panels earlier this year.

    “Our commitment to building the entire solar supply chain in the United States remains,” Stoepker said. “We will soon be back on track with the full force of our Georgia team delivering American-made energy to communities around the country.”

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  • Consumer sentiment tumbles close to record lows in latest U Michigan survey

    NEW YORK — Consumer sentiment dropped to a three-year low and close to the lowest point ever recorded by the University of Michigan one month into the government shutdown, with pessimism over personal finances and anticipated business conditions weighing on Americans.

    The November survey showed the index of consumer sentiment at 50.4, down a startling 6.2% from last month and it plunged nearly 30% from a year ago.

    Economists were caught off guard. Those polled had expected a slight month-to-month increase for a reading of 54.2.

    “With the federal government shutdown dragging on for over a month, consumers are now expressing worries about potential negative consequences for the economy,” said Joanne Hsu, Surveys of Consumers Director at University of Michigan. “This month’s decline in sentiment was widespread throughout the population, seen across age, income, and political affiliation.”

    The one exception, Hsu said, were those with large stock holdings. Big tech companies, particularly in artificial intelligence, have driven explosive returns for investors. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is up 17% this year.

    “The top 20% of households by income drive 40% of consumer spending, and we think the wealth effect from the buoyant stock market has strengthened this year,” according to Michael Pearce, deputy chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics.

    The nation’s largest retail trade group on Thursday forecast a trillion-dollar Christmas, with sales during November and December seen growing up to 4.2%.

    The UMich survey showed that year-ahead inflation expectations inched up to 4.7% in November from 4.6% last month, and long-run inflation expectations declined to 3.6% from 3.9% last month.

    James Knightley, chief international economist at ING, said the report’s key takeaway is jobs.

    “Seventy-one percent of households now expect unemployment to rise over the coming (12 months) while only 9% expect unemployment to fall. That gives a net reading of 62% predicting higher unemployment versus 52% last month,” Knightley said. “A huge increase which … has historically been the prelude to an ugly outcome for jobs.”

    The first Friday of the month is typically when the government releases its key jobs report, but all data reports are on hold during the shutdown. Economists have turned to private sources which are showing that job seekers are taking longer to land a job in a ” low hires, low fires ” market.

    At least one economist noted a change in methodology may have impacted the survey results.

    “These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, given the likely temporary drag on confidence from the ongoing government shutdown, plus the Michigan survey’s switch to online rather than phone-based sampling last year, which seems to have introduced a structural break that produces more downbeat results,” said Oliver Allen, senior U.S. economist for Pantheon Macroeconomics.

    The UMich survey was conducted before Election Day on Tuesday.

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  • ‘No hire’ job market leaves unemployed in limbo as threats to economy multiply

    WASHINGTON — When Carly Kaprive left a job in Kansas City and moved to Chicago a year ago, she figured it would take three to six months to find a new position. After all, the 32-year old project manager had never been unemployed for longer than three months.

    Instead, after 700 applications, she’s still looking, wrapped up in a frustrating and extended job hunt that is much more difficult than when she last looked for work just a couple of years ago. With uncertainty over interest rates, tariffs, immigration, and artificial intelligence roiling much of the economy, some companies she’s interviewed with have abruptly decided not to fill the job at all.

    “I have definitely had mid-interview roles be eliminated entirely, that they are not going to move forward with even hiring anybody,” she said.

    Kaprive is caught in a historical anomaly: The unemployment rate is low and the economy is still growing, but those out of work face the slowest pace of hiring in more than a decade. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, calls it a “jobless boom.”

    While big corporate layoff announcements typically grab the most attention, it has been the unwillingness of many companies to add workers that has created a more painful job market than the low 4.3% unemployment rate would suggest. It is also more bifurcated: The “low hire, low fire” economy has meant fewer layoffs for those with jobs, while the unemployed struggle to find work.

    “It’s like an insider-outsider thing,” Guy Berger, head of research at the Burning Glass Institute said, “where outsiders that need jobs are struggling to get their foot in, even as insiders are insulated by what up until now is a low-layoff environment.”

    Several large companies have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts in the past few weeks, including UPS, Target, and IBM, though Berger said it is too soon to tell whether they signal a turn for the worse in the economy. But a rise in job cuts would be particularly challenging with hiring already so low.

    For now, it’s harder than ever to get a clear read on the job market because the government shutdown has cut off the U.S. Department of Labor’s monthly employment reports. The October jobs report was scheduled for release Friday but has been delayed, like the September figures before it. The October report may be less comprehensive when it is released because not all the data may be collected.

    Before the shutdown, the Labor Department reported that the hiring rate — the number of people hired in a given month, as a percentage of those employed — fell to 3.2% in August, matching the lowest figure outside the pandemic since March 2013.

    Back then, the unemployment rate was a painful 7.5%, as the economy slowly recovered from the job losses from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. That is much higher than August’s 4.3%.

    Many of those out of work are skeptical of the current low rate. Brad Mislow, 54, has been mostly unemployed for the past three years after losing a job as an advertising executive in New York City. Now he is substitute teaching to make ends meet.

    “It is frustrating to hear that the unemployment rate is low, the economy is great,” he said. “I think there are people in this economy who are basically fighting every day and holding on to pieces of flotsam in the shark-filled waters or, they have no idea what it’s like.”

    With the government closed, financial markets are paying closer attention to private-sector data, but that is also mixed. On Thursday, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas unnerved investors with a report that announced job cuts surged 175% in October from a year ago.

    Yet on Wednesday, payroll processor ADP said that net hiring picked up in October as businesses added 42,000 jobs, after two months of declines. Still, the gain was modest. ADP’s figures are based on anonymous data from the 26 million workers at its client companies.

    Separately, Revelio Labs, a workplace analytics company, estimated Thursday that the economy shed 9,000 jobs in October. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimates that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4% last month.

    Even when the government was releasing data, economists and officials at the Federal Reserve weren’t sure how healthy the job market was or where it was headed next. A sharp drop in immigration and stepped-up deportations have helped keep the unemployment rate low simply by reducing the supply of workers. The economy doesn’t need to create as many jobs to keep the unemployment rate from rising.

    Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, has called in a “curious balance” because both the supply of and demand for workers has fallen.

    Economists point to many reasons for the hiring slowdown, but most share a common thread: Greater uncertainty from tariffs, the potential impact of artificial intelligence, and now the government shutdown. While investment in data centers to power AI is booming, elevated interest rates have kept many other parts of the economy weak, such as manufacturing and housing.

    “The concentration of economic gains (in AI) has left the economy looking better on paper than it feels to most Americans,” Swonk said.

    Younger Americans have borne the brunt of the hiring slowdown, but many older workers have also struggled.

    Suzanne Elder, 65, is an operations executive with extensive experience in health care, and two years ago the Chicago resident also found work quickly — three months after she left a job, she had three offers. Now she’s been unemployed since April.

    She is worried that her age is a challenge, but isn’t letting it hold her back. “I got a job at 63, so I don’t see a reason to not get a job at 65,” she said.

    Like many job-hunters, she has been stunned by the impersonal responses from recruiters, often driven by hiring software. She received one email from a company that thanked her for speaking with them, though she never had an interview. Another company that never responded to her resume asked her to fill out a survey about their interaction.

    Weak hiring has meant unemployment spells are getting longer, according to government data. More than one-quarter of those out of work have been unemployed for more than six months or longer, a figure that rose sharply in July and August and is up from 21% a year ago.

    Swonk said that such increases are unusual outside recessions.

    A rising number of the unemployed have also given up on their job searches, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. That also holds down the unemployment rate because people who stop looking aren’t counted as unemployed.

    But Kaprive is still sticking with it — she’s taken classes about Amazon’s web services platform to boost her technology skills.

    “We can’t be narrow-minded in what we’re willing to take,” she said.

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  • ‘No hire’ job market leaves unemployed in limbo as threats to economy multiply

    WASHINGTON — When Carly Kaprive left a job in Kansas City and moved to Chicago a year ago, she figured it would take three to six months to find a new position. After all, the 32-year old project manager had never been unemployed for longer than three months.

    Instead, after 700 applications, she’s still looking, wrapped up in a frustrating and extended job hunt that is much more difficult than when she last looked for work just a couple of years ago. With uncertainty over interest rates, tariffs, immigration, and artificial intelligence roiling much of the economy, some companies she’s interviewed with have abruptly decided not to fill the job at all.

    “I have definitely had mid-interview roles be eliminated entirely, that they are not going to move forward with even hiring anybody,” she said.

    Kaprive is caught in a historical anomaly: The unemployment rate is low and the economy is still growing, but those out of work face the slowest pace of hiring in more than a decade. Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, calls it a “jobless boom.”

    While big corporate layoff announcements typically grab the most attention, it has been the unwillingness of many companies to add workers that has created a more painful job market than the low 4.3% unemployment rate would suggest. It is also more bifurcated: The “low hire, low fire” economy has meant fewer layoffs for those with jobs, while the unemployed struggle to find work.

    “It’s like an insider-outsider thing,” Guy Berger, head of research at the Burning Glass Institute said, “where outsiders that need jobs are struggling to get their foot in, even as insiders are insulated by what up until now is a low-layoff environment.”

    Several large companies have recently announced tens of thousands of job cuts in the past few weeks, including UPS, Target, and IBM, though Berger said it is too soon to tell whether they signal a turn for the worse in the economy. But a rise in job cuts would be particularly challenging with hiring already so low.

    For now, it’s harder than ever to get a clear read on the job market because the government shutdown has cut off the U.S. Department of Labor’s monthly employment reports. The October jobs report was scheduled for release Friday but has been delayed, like the September figures before it. The October report may be less comprehensive when it is released because not all the data may be collected.

    Before the shutdown, the Labor Department reported that the hiring rate — the number of people hired in a given month, as a percentage of those employed — fell to 3.2% in August, matching the lowest figure outside the pandemic since March 2013.

    Back then, the unemployment rate was a painful 7.5%, as the economy slowly recovered from the job losses from the 2008-2009 Great Recession. That is much higher than August’s 4.3%.

    Many of those out of work are skeptical of the current low rate. Brad Mislow, 54, has been mostly unemployed for the past three years after losing a job as an advertising executive in New York City. Now he is substitute teaching to make ends meet.

    “It is frustrating to hear that the unemployment rate is low, the economy is great,” he said. “I think there are people in this economy who are basically fighting every day and holding on to pieces of flotsam in the shark-filled waters or, they have no idea what it’s like.”

    With the government closed, financial markets are paying closer attention to private-sector data, but that is also mixed. On Thursday, the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas unnerved investors with a report that announced job cuts surged 175% in October from a year ago.

    Yet on Wednesday, payroll processor ADP said that net hiring picked up in October as businesses added 42,000 jobs, after two months of declines. Still, the gain was modest. ADP’s figures are based on anonymous data from the 26 million workers at its client companies.

    Separately, Revelio Labs, a workplace analytics company, estimated Thursday that the economy shed 9,000 jobs in October. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago estimates that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4% last month.

    Even when the government was releasing data, economists and officials at the Federal Reserve weren’t sure how healthy the job market was or where it was headed next. A sharp drop in immigration and stepped-up deportations have helped keep the unemployment rate low simply by reducing the supply of workers. The economy doesn’t need to create as many jobs to keep the unemployment rate from rising.

    Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, has called in a “curious balance” because both the supply of and demand for workers has fallen.

    Economists point to many reasons for the hiring slowdown, but most share a common thread: Greater uncertainty from tariffs, the potential impact of artificial intelligence, and now the government shutdown. While investment in data centers to power AI is booming, elevated interest rates have kept many other parts of the economy weak, such as manufacturing and housing.

    “The concentration of economic gains (in AI) has left the economy looking better on paper than it feels to most Americans,” Swonk said.

    Younger Americans have borne the brunt of the hiring slowdown, but many older workers have also struggled.

    Suzanne Elder, 65, is an operations executive with extensive experience in health care, and two years ago the Chicago resident also found work quickly — three months after she left a job, she had three offers. Now she’s been unemployed since April.

    She is worried that her age is a challenge, but isn’t letting it hold her back. “I got a job at 63, so I don’t see a reason to not get a job at 65,” she said.

    Like many job-hunters, she has been stunned by the impersonal responses from recruiters, often driven by hiring software. She received one email from a company that thanked her for speaking with them, though she never had an interview. Another company that never responded to her resume asked her to fill out a survey about their interaction.

    Weak hiring has meant unemployment spells are getting longer, according to government data. More than one-quarter of those out of work have been unemployed for more than six months or longer, a figure that rose sharply in July and August and is up from 21% a year ago.

    Swonk said that such increases are unusual outside recessions.

    A rising number of the unemployed have also given up on their job searches, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. That also holds down the unemployment rate because people who stop looking aren’t counted as unemployed.

    But Kaprive is still sticking with it — she’s taken classes about Amazon’s web services platform to boost her technology skills.

    “We can’t be narrow-minded in what we’re willing to take,” she said.

    Source link

  • Asian Shares Advance After Solid Earnings and Economic Reports Updates Lift Wall Street

    BANGKOK (AP) — Shares bounced back Thursday in Asia after Wall Street got a boost from upbeat economic updates and a steady flow of quarterly reports from U.S. companies.

    U.S. futures were little changed and oil prices advanced.

    In Tokyo, the Nikkei 225 gained 1.5% to 50,959.14.

    Shares in Nissan Motor Co. gained 1.3% after the company said it was selling its headquarters building in Yokohama to raise cash. Nissan was due to report its earnings later in the day.

    The Kospi in South Korea advanced 1.2% to 4,054.15 and Taiwan’s Taiex was up 0.7%.

    Hong Kong’s Hang Seng jumped 1.6% to 26,361.40, while the Shanghai Composite index climbed 0.9% to 4,004.25.

    However, shares in autonomous driving companies Pony.ai and WeRide fell in their debut on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

    Pony.ai was down 13% while WeRide’s shares fell 13.7%.

    On Wednesday, U.S. stocks gained ground with broad gains, reversing the prior day’s dip. Much of the market’s push and pull came from the technology sector, where several companies with huge values have an outsized influence over the market.

    Google’s parent, Alphabet, jumped 2.4%, Broadcom rose 2%, and Facebook parent Meta Platforms rose 1.4%. They helped lead the way higher for the broader market. Their gains also helped counter losses from a few technology behemoths, including Nvidia and Microsoft.

    Overall The S&P 500 rose 0.4% to 6,796.29. The Dow Jones Industrial Average picked up 0.5% to 47,311. The Nasdaq composite rose 0.6% to 23,499.80.

    Company earnings and forecasts were once again a big focus for Wall Street, with results coming from a broad spectrum of industries.

    McDonald’s rose 2.2% after reporting that its sales benefited from the return of its popular Snack Wraps in the third quarter. International Flavors & Fragrances jumped 4.1% after beating Wall Street’s latest quarterly profit forecasts.

    On the losing side, Taser maker Axon Enterprise slumped 9.4% after forecasting weaker profits than analysts were expecting. Live Nation Entertainment fell 10.6% after its latest results fell short of analysts’ forecasts.

    The latest round of earnings offers Wall Street a source of information on consumers, businesses and the economy that is otherwise lacking amid the government shutdown. Important monthly updates on inflation and employment have ceased, leaving investors, economists and the Federal Reserve without a fuller picture of the economy.

    There are still several informative private economic updates that Wall Street can review.

    A monthly report from ADP showed that private payrolls rose more than expected in October. The report offers a partial glimpse into the job market, which has been generally weakening and raising broader concerns about economic growth.

    A weaker job market remains a big concern for the Fed. The central bank cut its benchmark rate for the second time this year at its most recent meeting, in part to help bolster the economy amid a weakening job market. Lower interest rates can make a wide range of loans and credit less expensive, potentially promoting economic growth. But, lower rates can also add fuel to inflation, which could stunt economic growth.

    Fed Chair Jerome Powell and several other Fed officials have expressed concerns about more rate cuts, as inflation remains stubbornly above the central bank’s target of 2%. Consumer prices rose 3% in September.

    The mix of a weaker job market and hot inflation leaves the Fed in a tough position.

    The threat of tariffs also continues to hang over consumers and businesses. President Donald Trump’s trade war with China, Canada and many other nations has been unpredictable, making it hard to measure the full impact of higher prices. The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday about the legality of the sweeping tariffs.

    In other dealings early Thursday, U.S. benchmark crude gained 26 cents to $59.86 per barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, advanced 25 cents to $63.77 per barrel.

    The U.S. dollar fell to 153.85 Japanese yen from 154.11 yen. The euro rose to $1.1510 from $1.1494.

    AP Business Writer Damian J. Troise contributed.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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  • The AI Data Center Boom Is Warping the US Economy

    The amount of capital pouring into AI data center projects is staggering. Last week, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon reported their 2025 capital expenditures would total roughly $370 billion, and they expect that number to keep rising in 2026. The biggest spender last quarter was Microsoft, which put nearly $35 billion into data centers and other investments, equivalent to 45 percent of its revenue.

    Rarely, if ever, has a single technology absorbed this much money this quickly. Warnings of an AI bubble are getting louder every day, but whether or not a crash eventually happens, the frenzy is already reshaping the US economy. Harvard economist Jason Furman estimates that investment in data centers and software processing technology accounted for nearly all of US GDP growth in the first half of 2025.

    Today, we’re looking at how data centers are impacting three crucial areas: public markets, jobs, and energy.

    Cashing Out

    The US stock market is booming, mostly thanks to AI. Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, AI-related stocks have accounted for 75 percent of S&P 500 returns and 80 percent of earnings growth, according to JPMorgan’s Michael Cembalest. The question now is whether that growth will be sustainable as tech firms continue spending heavily on AI infrastructure.

    At the start of this year, tech giants were financing their AI projects mostly with cash they had on hand. As financial journalist Derek Thompson pointed out, the ten largest US public companies kicked off 2025 with historically high free cash flow margins. In other words, their businesses were so profitable that they had billions of dollars sitting around to put towards Nvidia GPUs and data center buildouts.

    That trend has largely continued through 2025. Alphabet, for example, told investors last week that its capital expenditures this year would be as much as $93 billion, an increase from its previous estimate of $75 billion. But it also reported that revenue was up 33 percent year over year. Put another way, Silicon Valley is both spending more and earning more. That means everything is fine, right?

    Not exactly. For one thing, tech giants appear to be using accounting tricks to make their financials look rosier than they may really be in reality. A significant portion of AI investment flows to Nvidia, which releases new versions of its GPUs approximately every two years. But companies like Microsoft and Alphabet are currently estimating that their chips will last six years. If they need to upgrade sooner to stay competitive—a likely possibility—that could wind up eating into their profits and weaken their overall performance.

    Louise Matsakis

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  • Pope Leo Calls for ‘Deep Reflection’ About Treatment of Detained Migrants in the United States

    VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Leo XIV called for “deep reflection” in the United States about the treatment of migrants held in detention, saying that “many people who have lived for years and years and years, never causing problems, have been deeply affected by what is going on right now.”

    Leo underlined that scripture emphasizes the question that will be posed at the end of the world: “How did you receive the foreigner, did you receive him and welcome him, or not? I think there is a deep reflection that needs to be made about what is happening.”

    He said “the spiritual rights of people who have been detained should also be considered,’’ and he called on authorities to allow pastoral workers access to the detained migrants. “Many times they’ve been separated from their families. No one knows what’s happening, but their own spiritual needs should be attended to,” Leo said.

    Leo last month urged labor union leaders visiting from Chicago to advocate for immigrants and welcome minorities into their ranks.

    Asked about the lethal attacks on suspected drug traffickers off Venezuela, the pontiff said the military action was “increasing tension,’’ noting that they were coming even closer to the coastline.

    “The thing is to seek dialogue,’’ the pope said.

    On the Middle East, Leo acknowledged that the first phase of the peace accord between Israel and Hamas remains “very fragile,’’ and said that the parties need to find a way forward on future governance “and how you can guarantee the rights of all peoples.’’

    Asked about Israeli settler attacks on Palestinians i n the West Bank, the pope described the settlement issue as “complex,’’ adding: “Israel has said one thing, then it’s done another sometimes. We need to try to work together for justice for all peoples.’’

    Pope Leo will receive Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Vatican on Thursday. At the end of November he will make his first trip as Pope to Turkey and Lebanon.

    Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Photos You Should See – Oct. 2025

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