Some blue-collar employees who lost their jobs early in the pandemic are now holding out for positions that would allow them to work from home.

Jade Campbell, 34, has been out of work since March 2020, when the pandemic temporarily shuttered the Old Navy store where she had worked as a sales associate. When the store called her back in the fall, she was in the middle of a difficult pregnancy, with a first-grade son who was struggling to focus during online classes. She decided to stay home, applying for different types of government assistance.

Ms. Campbell now lives on her own in Queens without child care support; her children are 1 and 8 years old. She has refused to get vaccinated against Covid-19, a prerequisite in New York City for many in-person jobs. Still, she said she felt optimistic about applying for remote customer service roles after she reached out to Goodwill NYNJ, a nonprofit, for help with her résumé.

“I got two kids I know I have to support,” she said. “I can’t really depend on the government to help me out.”

At Petri Plumbing Heating in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, several workers quit over the city’s policy that employees of private businesses be fully vaccinated. The restriction was the most stringent in the country when it was announced in December 2021 at the end of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s term.

After Mayor Eric Adams signaled earlier this year that his administration would not enforce the mandate, Michael Petri, the company’s owner, offered to rehire three former workers. One returned, another had found another job and the third had moved to another state, he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/nyregion/nyc-covid-job-losses.html

The expanded child tax credit increased the subsidy to $3,600 for every child under the age of 6 and $3,000 for those 6 to 17, and extended it to parents not working. It was responsible for removing 2.1 million children of the 3.4 million who left poverty. Making it permanent, as progressives have advocated, would signify a departure from a trend toward incentivizing work that began in the 1990s with tougher welfare laws.

Some economists have argued that permanently expanding the child tax credit would over the long term lead some parents to work less, increasing poverty. The census report found poverty among year-round, full-time workers to be almost nonexistent, at 2 percent. But others have found the credit’s potential effects on work force participation to be much more minor, and the impact on children to be beneficial nonetheless.

“Maybe you will have a few people stop working, but regardless, there’s going to be a big decrease in child poverty,” said Jacob Bastian, an economist at Rutgers University. “We should encourage people to work as much as we can, but I don’t think that means we don’t help people.”

In 2021 alone, surveys show, the child tax credit prompted low-income families to eat more healthy meals, pay for more tutoring and extracurricular activities for children and spend more on their own professional development. Even if 2021 marks a low point in the poverty rate — and measures of financial hardship are already on the rise — some beneficial effects may persist.

“Even temporary support can have lasting impact,” said Christopher Wimer, who directs the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at the Columbia University School of Social Work. “There is a great literature that shows — not just suggests, but shows — that improvements in income, especially at early ages, have long-term payoffs for kids.”

Margot Sanger-Katz contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/business/economy/income-poverty-census-bureau.html

But the country’s economic reality remains more muddled than Mr. Biden’s rosy message, as the inflation report underscored. Food prices are continuing to spike, straining lower-income families in particular. The global economy is slowing sharply, and threats remain to the American recovery if European sanctions force millions of barrels of Russian oil off the global market in the months to come.

A possible railroad strike could disrupt domestic supply chains. The White House press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, told reporters on Tuesday that the president had called union and company leaders on Monday in an attempt to broker an agreement to avert the strike.

Most important — and perhaps most damaging for Mr. Biden and Democrats — Americans’ wages have struggled to keep pace with fast-rising prices, an uncomfortable truth for a president who promised to make real wage gains a centerpiece of his economic program. Inflation-adjusted average hourly earnings ticked up across the economy in August, the Labor Department said on Tuesday, but they remain down nearly 3 percent from a year ago.

Republicans were quick to criticize Mr. Biden after the report on Tuesday. “Every day, Americans endure Biden’s economic crisis,” said Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri, the top Republican on the Small Business Committee. “The Democrats’ inflation continues to drive up costs and leads more and more small businesses and families questioning their future.”

Mr. Biden and his aides have celebrated falling gasoline prices on a daily basis throughout the summer. Those decreasing prices have helped inflation moderate from its high point this year, though not enough to offset rising rent, food and other costs last month.

Even as he acknowledges the pain of rapid price increases across the economy, Mr. Biden has claimed progress in the fight against inflation, including with the signing last month of the energy, health care and tax bill that Democrats called the Inflation Reduction Act. On Tuesday morning, he sought to put a positive shine on the August data, saying in a statement issued by the White House that it was a sign of “more progress” in bringing down inflation.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/us/politics/biden-inflation-report-economy.html

Prices climbed 0.1 percent from July as rapid increases hit a variety of products and services, including food away from home, new cars, dental care and vehicle repair. Given how much gas prices fell in August, the price index had been forecast to decline on a monthly basis.

The upshot is that inflation retains a surprising amount of underlying momentum, which is bad news for Fed officials. Central bankers have been looking for a sustained slowdown in price increases as evidence that their policies are working to cool demand and nudge the economy back toward a healthy environment in which inflation is slow, steady and barely noticeable.

Until that happens, officials have pledged to continue raising interest rates quickly, which can slow borrowing, constrain consumer demand and tamp down hiring and wage growth.

“Inflation is far too high, and it is too soon to say whether inflation is moving meaningfully and persistently downward,” Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, said in a speech last week. “This is a fight we cannot, and will not, walk away from.”

So far, there is little sign that the Fed’s efforts are tanking consumer and business demand. Growth has slowed, but it has not plummeted, and both hiring and wage gains remain rapid. Employers added 315,000 jobs last month, job openings remain high and consumer spending has continued to eke out gains, albeit decelerating ones, this summer.

“Inflation remains hot, financial conditions have seen some improvement and the labor markets are humming along,” Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economics at Renaissance Macro, wrote in a research note after the release. “If the goal is to slow things down and create some pain, the Fed is failing by its own standard.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/13/business/economy/inflation-cpi-federal-reserve.html

Mr. Tubbs’s passion for the idea is rooted in personal experience. He grew up in Stockton with a single mother, and they lived on a tight budget. Guaranteed income programs like those sprouting now, he said, could have helped his family.

Preliminary research by Stacia West of the University of Tennessee and Amy Castro of the University of Pennsylvania, based on the first year of Stockton’s two-year program, found that giving families $500 each month reduced those households’ income fluctuations, enabling recipients to find full-time employment.

Researchers, for example, found that 28 percent of recipients had full-time employment when the program started in February 2019; a year later, the figure was 40 percent.

In one case, a participant had been studying to get his real estate license for more than a year — a pathway to more consistent, higher-paying work — but could not find time to study while piecing together an income doing gig jobs. The money from the pilot program, researchers found, gave him the time to study and get his license.

Now the lessons are being tested on a much broader scale.

Abigail Marquez, a general manager overseeing the Los Angeles pilot program, said the goal of her city’s effort was to promote changes to the ways federal public benefit programs were designed.

“Many, if not all, public benefit program regulations contradict each other, are difficult to navigate and are not focused on creating pathways to greater economic opportunity,” Ms. Marquez said. (Some states, including California, have built-in exemptions to ensure that accepting funding from the pilot programs does not put recipients at risk of losing certain state and federal assistance.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/business/economy/guaranteed-income.html

“Failure to finalize an agreement before the Sept. 16 deadline will hurt U.S. consumers and imperil the availability, affordability and accessibility of everyday essential products,” the Consumer Brands Association, which represents manufacturers of food, beverage, household and personal care products, said in a letter to Mr. Biden last week.

In a statement over the weekend, Corey Rosenbusch, the president of the Fertilizer Institute, an industry group, said a potential work stoppage would be “bad news for farmers and food security.”

The Association of American Railroads, a freight rail industry group, said a disruption to service would cost more than $2 billion per day in economic output, idle thousands of trains and result in widespread product shortages and job losses. Rail accounts for about 28 percent of U.S. freight movement, second only to trucking’s nearly 40 percent, according to federal data.

More than 460,000 additional trucks would be needed each day to carry the goods otherwise delivered by rail, the American Trucking Associations, another industry group, said in a letter last week asking lawmakers to be prepared to intervene. The trucking industry faces a shortage of 80,000 drivers, so a rail disruption would “create havoc in the supply chain and fuel inflationary pressures across the board,” it said.

In a message on Friday, Steve Bobb, the chief marketing officer of one of the rail carriers, BNSF, encouraged customers to ask Congress to intervene. His counterpart at Norfolk Southern echoed that request to its customers over the weekend, too.

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said on Friday that he was hopeful that a strike could be averted, but was prepared to act if not.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/12/business/economy/freight-railroad-strike.html