Elon Musk, who inhabits the role of a gonzo captain of industry like no other figure in modern American life, has lately been dreaming aloud about building his own version of an old-fashioned company town. And not just dreaming. In September, Bastrop County, Texas, outside Austin, approved the construction of Project Amazing, a subdivision of […]
Read More
CARPI, Italy — The older woman asked to hear a story. “An excellent choice,” answered the small robot, reclined like a nonchalant professor atop the classroom’s desk, instructing her to listen closely. She leaned in, her wizened forehead almost touching the smooth plastic head. “Once upon a time,” the robot began a brief tale, and […]
Read More
The union representing 30,000 education workers reached a tentative deal with the Los Angeles Unified School District on Friday, following a three-day strike that closed hundreds of campuses and canceled classes for 422,000 students earlier this week. Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents support workers in the school district, sought a […]
Read More
Many of the minors crossed unaccompanied from Latin American countries and may not know when their employment violates the law. A 13-year-old who was burned with caustic chemicals while working for Packers Sanitation Services in Nebraska told investigators the accident occurred during a shift that lasted from 11 p.m. to 5 or 7 a.m., a […]
Read More
WASHINGTON — The Federal Reserve’s decision on Wednesday on whether to raise rates at a precarious moment carries risks not just for the central bank, but also for President Biden. Mr. Biden was already relying on the Fed to maintain a delicate balance with its interest rate decisions, simultaneously taming rapid price growth while avoiding plunging the […]
Read More
Quiet quitting. Working from home. The Great Resignation. Whatever you want to call it, the attitude of many Americans toward work appears to have changed during the long pandemic — and, generally speaking, not for the better. This new approach threatens to do long-lasting damage to economic growth and prosperity. Until Covid, most employed Americans […]
Read More
PARIS — President Emmanuel Macron’s re-election program last year was short on detail. His mind seemed elsewhere, chiefly on the war in Ukraine. But on one thing he was clear: He would raise the retirement age in France to 65 from 62. “You will have to work progressively more,” he said during a debate in […]
Read More
Television and movie writers want raises, saying that Hollywood companies have taken unfair advantage of the shift to streaming to devalue their work and create worsening working conditions. The companies bristle at the accusation and say that, while they are willing to negotiate a new “mutually beneficial” deal with writers, the demands for an entirely […]
Read More
One year after its surprise victory at a Staten Island warehouse, the only union in the country representing Amazon workers has endured a series of setbacks and conflicts that have caused longtime supporters to question if it will survive. In interviews, a dozen people who have been closely involved with the Amazon Labor Union said […]
Read More
Tens of thousands of Los Angeles school employees are planning to strike for three days starting on Tuesday, which could force hundreds of campuses to close and cancel classes for 422,000 students. The union that represents 30,000 support workers in the Los Angeles Unified School District is seeking a 30 percent pay increase, saying that […]
Read More
After returning home from his job at a car battery recycling plant in northern Mexico one evening in 2019, Azael Mateo González Ramírez said he felt dizzy, his bones ached and his throat was raspy. Then came stomach pain, he said, followed by bouts of diarrhea. The plant in Monterrey where he worked handled used […]
Read More
In 2018, MIT convened its Task Force on the Work of the Future, which concluded in a 2020 report that while new technologies were not necessarily going to massively wipe out employment, smart practices and policies would be necessary to let automation complement good jobs. Today a successor group is continuing the task force’s effort: […]
Read More
If we apply the legal scholar John A. Powell’s “targeted universalism” approach to eradicating poverty — an approach that involves setting a goal and recognizing that certain groups will need distinctive interventions for that goal to be met — then our attitude toward different antipoverty policies should be “both and.” We don’t need new solutions […]
Read More
PARIS — Hundreds of thousands of French protesters on Wednesday swarmed cities across the country, and striking workers disrupted rail lines and closed schools to protest the government’s plan to raise the legal retirement age, in a final show of force before the contested bill comes to a vote on Thursday. The march — the […]
Read More
I asked Joel Kotkin, presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute in Houston, about the economics of major cities, and he replied by email: “The era of urban supremacy is over. The party that addresses this will win. These areas need infrastructure and tax structures that […]
Read More
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, said on Tuesday that it planned to lay off about 10,000 employees, or roughly 13 percent of its work force, the latest move to hew to what the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has called a “year of efficiency.” The layoffs will affect its recruiting team this week, with […]
Read More
A favorite phrase of Emmanuel Macron, the French president, is that in life “you have to take your risks.” He did, and rose from nowhere to lead France at the age of 39. Now, six years later, he has decided to risk his political future on reshaping France at the very point where it is […]
Read More
Britain’s top financial official started the year with a plea. To those who retired early in the pandemic or have not found the right job after furlough, Jeremy Hunt said, “Britain needs you.” Many analysts have concluded the British economy is stumbling partly because it doesn’t have enough workers. The Bank of England has slashed […]
Read More
For decades, institutions of higher education provided steady, well-paid jobs in small towns where the industrial base was waning. But the tide of young people finishing high school is now also starting to recede, creating a stark new reality for colleges and universities — and the communities that grew up around them. As Americans have […]
Read More
Ryan McCarty, the Cincinnati branch director for the employment agency Robert Half, was away from home for 13 hours a day before the pandemic, including evening events and his 45-minute commute. Now he works from home, which he said has enabled him to be there for his two toddlers for meals, doctor visits and milestones. […]
Read More
/Shop Talk/ A column in The New York Times Sunday Business section that explores the hidden meaning of business jargon. Perusing LinkedIn might not seem like the typical way to spend your downtime. But for Lora Kelley, a New York Times business reporting fellow interested in the ways business shapes culture, the platform is a […]
Read More
As hundreds of Palestinians filed through an Israeli checkpoint one recent Monday morning, most were dressed for a day of manual labor. But there was at least one striking exception. Moha Alshawamreh, 31, wore a button-up shirt and carried a computer. While many of his relatives and neighbors, mostly male, were headed to the construction […]
Read More
A bid to reassure investors goes awry The failure of Silicon Valley Bank was caused by a run on the bank. The company was not, at least until clients started rushing for the exits, insolvent or even close to insolvent. But if the banking business is ultimately a confidence game, the game ended quickly. The […]
Read More
While the impact of the law remains unclear, it has buoyed the spirits of some farmworkers. Asuncion Ponce started harvesting grapes along the rolling green hills of the Central Valley in the late 1980s. Through the decades, Mr. Ponce has worked on several farms with U.F.W. contracts. Bosses on those farms, he said, seemed aware […]
Read More
With a series of raids and arrests this winter, the Belgian authorities unearthed what they said was a dirty deal at the heart of the European Parliament. Politicians are charged with pocketing money to praise the tiny Gulf nation of Qatar and downplay its labor rights abuses in the run-up to the World Cup. Well […]
Read More
I’m trying something a little different in today’s newsletter. A big part of what I try to do is to look for insights that explain the patterns and trends in world events, in ways that go beyond any single news story. Reading this newsletter should help you understand not just the latest development, but the […]
Read More
Federal Reserve officials received a complicated signal from February’s employment report, which showed that job growth retained substantial momentum nearly a year into the central bank’s campaign to slow the economy and cool rapid inflation. But it also included details hinting that the softening the Fed has been trying to achieve may be coming. Policymakers […]
Read More
The details of the right-to-work debate can be technical, but they’re worth taking a minute to understand. Above all, the laws mandate that nonunionized workers cannot be required to pay the equivalent of union dues, even if the union is negotiating pay and benefits on the workers’ behalf. Many contracts call for a company’s management […]
Read More
After an explosion in job growth at the start of the year, new data on Friday will show whether employers moderated their hiring in February — and whether any slowdown was enough to fundamentally upend the labor market’s momentum. Forecasters estimate that the economy added 225,000 positions last month, which would constitute a return to […]
Read More
The debate on Wall Street over the prospects for the American economy moved decidedly back toward the gloomy this week, as investors again recalibrated their expectations for how high interest rates could go. The shift came after the Federal Reserve’s chair, Jerome H. Powell, speaking to lawmakers on Tuesday, said the central bank might have […]
Read More
There’s a lot riding on farmers’ ability to fight weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy yields. To protect crops, farmers have two options: They can spray herbicides that pollute the environment and harm human health, or they can hire more workers. Unfortunately, both choices are becoming less tenable. Herbicide resistance is a growing problem […]
Read More