American employers had more than seven million unfilled jobs for the first time on record this summer, reflecting a historically tight labor market that is causing some businesses to struggle to find workers. There were a seasonally adjusted 7.136 million job openings on the last business day of August, the Labor Department said Tuesday. That […]
California’s unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1% in September from 4.2% the previous month — the lowest rate in 42 years, according to the state’s Employment Development Department. Payrolls in the state grew by 13,200 jobs compared with August, with the most gains coming in the business and professional services sector, the leisure and hospitality […]
Tomorrow’s successful apparel companies will be those that take the lead to enhance the apparel value chain on two fronts: nearshoring and automation. Both must be addressed, and in a sustainable way. Apparel brands and retailers in Europe and the United States can no longer do business as usual and expect to thrive. Owing to […]
Maybe the most obvious shortcoming is that there still aren’t as many people looking for work as there “should” be. In particular, the share of 25- to 54-year-olds — who you’d think would be in the prime of their careers and are in fact working — is still 0.4 percentage points below where it was […]
U.S. companies are putting savings from the corporate tax cut to use, but only a fraction of it is flowing to employees’ wallets, new data show. In the months after the December tax-code overhaul that lowered the corporate rate to 21% from 35%, dozens of companies such as Walmart Inc.and FedEx Corp. announced one-time bonuses […]
U.S. industries tied to national defense face an “unprecedented set of challenges” that have weakened their ability to quickly make the aircraft, parts and other materiel the military would need to fight rivals such as China or Russia, according to a new White House report. The vulnerabilities stem from factors including receding industrial capacity across […]
The national seasonally-adjusted unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos in the U.S. labor force fell to the lowest level on record in September of 2018, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released Friday show. In September, the unemployment rate for Hispanics and Latinos, aged 16 and up, was 4.5%, tying July 2018 for the […]
Optimism among U.S. manufacturers is soaring as the Republican-led tax cuts help fuel a white-hot economy with the lowest unemployment numbers in over a decade, but a significant labor shortage is undermining the gains, a new report shows. Nearly 93 percent of manufacturers are projecting further expansion for their businesses, and positive sentiment among smaller […]
The unemployment rate fell in September to the lowest level since the Vietnam War while hiring cooled slightly, the latest signs of an extremely tight labor market. The unemployment rate fell to 3.7% from 3.9% in August, the lowest rate since December 1969, the Labor Department said Friday. U.S. nonfarm payrolls rose a seasonally adjusted […]
Labor force composition and the allocation of talent remain of vital import to modern economies. For their part, governments and companies around the globe have implemented equal employment opportunity (EEO) regulations to influence labor market flows. Even though such regulations are pervasive, surprisingly little is known about their impacts. We use a natural field experiment […]
A significant sub-theme of Gov. Jerry Brown’s climate change conference in San Francisco this month was that California is a living model of how a nation-state can go green while experiencing economic prosperity. Some Californians take it a step further, contending that going green is itself an economic spur. Certainly California’s current economy is, at […]
The economic outlook among chief executives of America’s largest companies cooled slightly in the third quarter, as confrontational U.S. trade policies weighed on planning for capital spending and hiring. The Business Roundtable CEO Economic Outlook Index, which measures company plans for capital investment, hiring and sales, declined to 109.3 from 111.1 in the second quarter. […]
California’s economy will continue to grow in the coming years but the pace is expected to slow alongside a slowing economy on the national level, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast, which was released on Sept. 26. Economic growth at the state and national level are expected to weaken in 2020, according to UCLA Anderson […]
For the first time in its history, the Bay Area has more than 4 million jobs, powered by a continuing economic boom in the nine-county region that in August produced the most robust month for hiring in more than two years, state labor reports revealed Friday. “It’s a great milestone for the Bay Area to […]
In the next four years, more than 75 million jobs may be lost as companies shift to more automation, according to new estimates by the World Economic Forum. But the projections have an upside: 133 million new jobs will emerge during that period, as businesses develop a new division of labor between people and machines. […]