Employers are spending more on vacation perks and retirement contributions, helping to propel overall compensation package growth to its fastest pace in two years. Private-sector workers’ average hourly compensation, including both pay and benefits, advanced 4% from a year earlier in the third quarter, according to new Labor Department data. It’s the best gain in total compensation since the same quarter in 2015.
When the latest jobs report comes out Friday, look beyond the top-line number. For months now economists have suggested that the low unemployment rate—4.1% as of last month’s report—implies that America is at or near full employment. Yet the labor market is still below its prerecession peak, with about two million jobs missing. Many of those workers have joined the disability rolls. Others have simply dropped out of the workforce in favor of leisure time.
Republican plans to slash the state-and-local tax deduction are already reaping benefits in high-tax states. Democrats in the Northeast say they’re having second thoughts about raising taxes. And lo and behold, California Gov. Jerry Brown is arguing that public pensions aren’t ironclad.
Ford Motor Co. plans to produce a future electric car in Mexico rather than make it in the U.S., reversing plans announced in January to make its Flat Rock, Mich., assembly plant near Detroit its main electric-vehicle production site.
Trucking companies are bumping up orders for new big rigs, anticipating that 2018 will be a banner year for shipping demand.
Trucking fleets ordered 32,900 Class 8 trucks, the kind used on long-haul routes, in November, according to ACT Research, which compiles industry statistics. That was up about 70% from a year earlier. The last two months were also the strongest since the start of 2015.
Fleets are adding capacity as strong economic growth fuels surging volumes of freight through the nation’s transportation networks. Trucks are in high demand to carry record imports from ports to distribution centers, move machine parts and heavy goods for manufacturers and merchandise during the holiday shopping season. Shippers are paying higher rates as capacity tightens, creating an incentive to put more trucks on the road.
U.S. worker productivity rebounded in the third quarter while hourly wages rose moderately, further signs the economy is strengthening.
Productivity—a measure of goods and services produced in the U.S. per hour worked—rose at a 3% annual rate in July through September, the Labor Department said Wednesday, the biggest jump in three years.
Most Americans don’t need a college degree to get a job. Many do need to spend a lot of time on their feet and get some post-employment training if they want to keep it, according to a new Labor Department report detailing occupational requirements for American workers in 2017.
No car company outside China makes batteries for their electric cars. Investors should hope it stays that way.
Japanese group Panasonic makes the battery cells in Tesla’s much-hyped “gigafactory” in Nevada. Other global car makers also outsource production of cells to East Asian specialists, even if they assemble them into battery packs in their own plants. Mercedes-owner Daimler is plowing $1.2 billion into what it calls “battery factories” in Germany, China and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but these too will buy cells from others.
The U.S. economy is headed into the final stretch of 2017 powered by one of sturdiest periods of growth in its nine-year expansion, a vigor that is helping drive stock-market indexes to new highs.
“The storage battery is, in my opinion, a catchpenny, a sensation, a mechanism for swindling the public by stock companies,” wrote Thomas Edison in 1883.
Today, the battery industry is mustering for exponential growth as car makers electrify their fleets, most visibly at Tesla ’s $5 billion factory in Nevada. For investors looking to gain from the battery’s rise, though, the doubts of the 19th-century entrepreneur linger. The path to profitability is far from clear.
The workplace trend toward self-service and automation has indeed made some occupations obsolete. Customers have been accustomed to bagging their own groceries for at least a decade. Restaurant chains such as McDonald’s and Panera Bread are now rolling out kiosks that allow customers to place their own orders. And the automated delivery devices targeted by Mr. Yee will render some delivery jobs obsolete.
More than ever, the government requires Americans to get permission to earn a living. In the 1950s one in 20 workers needed a license to work; now about one in four do. The rules hurt the working poor in particular, but everyone suffers in states with the most licensing requirements, as a new and comprehensive report by the Institute for Justice (IJ) illustrates
Exxon Mobil Corp., BP PLC, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and other oil companies are spending millions of dollars a year in concert with auto makers such as Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV to create the next generation of super-slick engine lubricants. They are betting that the new, thinner oils will help them squeeze even more efficiency out of traditional car engines, allowing them to comply with stricter environmental rules and remain relevant as new technologies such as zero-emission electric vehicles gain traction.
. . . The new lubricants are meant to help auto makers build smaller, turbocharged engines that are still quite powerful, resulting in efficiency gains close to 15% compared with older models, said David Tsui, project manager for energy at consulting firm Kline & Co. “You’re trying to get these little engines to run at a jog pace, but with a really heavy load,” he said.
American climate-change activists point to Europe, and especially Germany, as the paragon of green energy virtue. But they ought to look closer at Angela Merkel’s political struggles as she tries to form a new government in Berlin amid the economic fallout from the Chancellor’s failing energy revolution.
Berlin last month conceded it will miss its 2020 carbon emissions-reduction goal, having cut emissions by just under 30% compared with 1990 instead of the 40% that Mrs. Merkel promised. The goal of 55% by 2030 is almost surely out of reach.
The decline in the U.S. industrial base over the past couple of decades is the main factor eroding the share of American national income that goes to middle-class workers, according to consultants at McKinsey & Co.
For decades, labor’s share of gross domestic product has shrunk—while the share that goes to capital like profits, interest and rent, has risen. The McKinsey Global Institute, the firm’s research arm, finds that manufacturing accounts for more than two-thirds of the overall decline in labor’s share of gross domestic product since 1990. That, in turn, has harmed the prospects of the middle class and widened income inequality.