“I think employers are embarrassed and ashamed by what they are objecting to and therefore use the N.R.F. as a cover,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

He added: “If you had a choice of going to a workplace, or as a customer to go to a store, that said, ‘All our employees are vaccinated or tested,’ or another store that says, ‘We have no idea who’s vaccinated or tested,’ which would you choose? And that’s why, let’s say, Acme Department Store doesn’t want to advertise that it’s promoting bad public policy.”

Many employers in industries, like retail, that have mandated vaccines at corporate offices have not required them for frontline workers, sharing concerns about challenges in hiring. But those workers, including about four million at stores, are among the most vulnerable. They interact frequently with the public and are less likely to be vaccinated themselves. Mandates at Tyson, United Airlines and several health care companies indicate that when faced with the prospect of losing their job, employees most frequently choose inoculation.

“We know vaccine requirements work,” said Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the White House. “The federal government, the country’s largest employer, has successfully implemented its requirement in a way that has boosted vaccinations and avoids any disruptions to operations.”

Still, companies mandating vaccines have faced protests or lawsuits. In some states legislation has been passed to impede it. Disney, for instance, paused a mandate for employees at Disney World in Florida after it became illegal for employers in the state to require workers to get the shot.

The panic and precautions tied to Covid-19 have played out at retail stores throughout the pandemic and ensnared their workers.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/business/retail-vaccine-mandates.html

“I think employers are embarrassed and ashamed by what they are objecting to and therefore use the N.R.F. as a cover,” said Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.

He added: “If you had a choice of going to a workplace, or as a customer to go to a store, that said, ‘All our employees are vaccinated or tested,’ or another store that says, ‘We have no idea who’s vaccinated or tested,’ which would you choose? And that’s why, let’s say, Acme Department Store doesn’t want to advertise that it’s promoting bad public policy.”

Many employers in industries, like retail, that have mandated vaccines at corporate offices have not required them for frontline workers, sharing concerns about challenges in hiring. But those workers, including about four million at stores, are among the most vulnerable. They interact frequently with the public and are less likely to be vaccinated themselves. Mandates at Tyson, United Airlines and several health care companies indicate that when faced with the prospect of losing their job, employees most frequently choose inoculation.

“We know vaccine requirements work,” said Kevin Munoz, a spokesman for the White House. “The federal government, the country’s largest employer, has successfully implemented its requirement in a way that has boosted vaccinations and avoids any disruptions to operations.”

Still, companies mandating vaccines have faced protests or lawsuits. In some states litigation has been passed to impede it. Disney, for instance, paused a mandate for employees at Disney World in Florida after it became illegal for employers in the state to require workers to get the shot.

The panic and precautions tied to Covid-19 have played out at retail stores throughout the pandemic and ensnared their workers.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/25/business/retail-vaccine-mandates.html

Mary Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, told Yahoo Finance this week that she would be open to supporting a quicker end to the bond-buying program if economic trends did not improve.

“If things continue to do what they’ve been doing, then I would completely support an accelerated pace of tapering,” Ms. Daly said.

Officials have tried to separate their path for slower bond buying from their plans for interest rates. But investors increasingly expect rate increases to start midway through 2022.

The Fed has said that it wants to achieve full employment before raising borrowing costs to cool the economy. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has said that he does not believe the labor market has met that test yet. More than four million jobs remain missing when compared with the number of people working before the pandemic.

Officials discussed why more workers were not returning to the labor force at the meeting, with several policymakers suggesting that “labor force participation would be structurally lower than in the past, and a few of these participants cited the high level of retirements recorded since the start of the pandemic.” Others continued to point to pandemic-related factors like child care constraints and concerns about the virus.

There have been some positive signs in recent weeks. Household spending in October rose 1.3 percent from September even as prices spiked, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. Data released by the Labor Department on Wednesday also found that initial jobless claims dropped to their lowest point since 1969, falling to 199,000 last week. But some economists cautioned that the weekly data was potentially overstated by seasonal factors, and claims could still increase in the coming weeks.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/business/economy/fed-fomc-meeting-minutes-november-2021.html

“Because of the strength of our economic recovery, American families have been able to buy more products,” Mr. Biden said this month at the Port of Baltimore. “And — but guess what? They’re not going out to dinner and lunch and going to the local bars because of Covid. So what are they doing? They’re staying home, they’re ordering online, and they’re buying product.”

That view is the closest thing the administration has offered to an explanation for why the White House was surprised by the size and durability of a price surge that has hurt Mr. Biden’s poll numbers and imperiled part of his economic agenda in Congress. From the administration’s perspective, the problem is not that there is too much money sloshing around, as Republicans and some economists insist, but that consumers are throwing an unexpectedly large amount of that money at a narrow set of things to buy.

Put another way: If Mr. Biden had sent people travel vouchers or DoorDash gift cards for services — instead of sending Americans direct payments as part of his $1.9 trillion rescue plan in March — the inflation picture might look different right now.

Inflation has risen across wealthy nations over the past year, but it has risen faster in the United States, where prices rose 6.2 percent in October from the year before. America’s inflation has been exacerbated, in part, by Mr. Biden and his predecessor, Donald J. Trump, pouring more fiscal support into the U.S. economy than their counterparts did elsewhere, at a time when consumption patterns shifted and did not rapidly snap back to normal.

Republicans, and even some left-leaning economists such as the former Obama administration officials Lawrence H. Summers and Jason Furman, have blamed the rapid price increases across the economy on the aid package that Mr. Biden signed in the spring. They say the package’s direct assistance to Americans, including $1,400 checks to individuals and enhanced benefits for the unemployed, fueled more consumer demand than the economy could bear, driving prices skyward.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/us/politics/biden-inflation-prices.html

Much of Ms. Ozoma’s work stems from experience. In June 2020, she and a colleague, Aerica Shimizu Banks, publicly accused their former employer, the virtual pinboard maker Pinterest, of racism and sexism. Pinterest initially denied the allegations but later apologized for its workplace culture. Its workers staged a walkout, and a former executive sued the company over gender discrimination.

“It’s remarkable how Ifeoma has taken some very painful experiences, developed solutions for them and then built a movement around making those solutions a reality,” said John Tye, the founder of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit that provides legal support to whistle-blowers. He and Ms. Ozoma recently appeared on a webinar to educate people on whistle-blower rights.

Meredith Whittaker, a former Google employee who helped organize a 2018 walkout over the company’s sexual harassment policy, added of Ms. Ozoma: “She has stuck around and worked to help others blow the whistle more safely.”

Ms. Ozoma, who grew up in Anchorage and Raleigh, N.C., became an activist after a five-year career in the tech industry. A political science major, she moved to Washington, D.C., in 2015 to join Google in government relations. She then worked at Facebook in Silicon Valley on international policy.

In 2018, Pinterest recruited Ms. Ozoma to its public policy team. There, she helped bring Ms. Banks on board. They spearheaded policy decisions including ending the promotion of anti-vaccination information and content related to plantation weddings on Pinterest, Ms. Ozoma said.

Yet Ms. Ozoma and Ms. Banks said they faced unequal pay, racist comments and retaliation for raising complaints at Pinterest. They left the company in May 2020. A month later, during the Black Lives Matter protests, Pinterest posted a statement supporting its Black employees.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/24/technology/pinterest-whistle-blower-ifeoma-ozoma.html

That included Senator Elizabeth Warren, who had called Mr. Powell “a dangerous man,” and suggested she would not support his renomination during a testy hearing in late September. Mr. Biden met with Ms. Warren on Nov. 9 in the Oval Office to discuss Fed appointments and called her last Thursday, before he had settled on a pick, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions.

On Friday, Mr. Biden called Mr. Powell and Ms. Brainard to inform them that he had made his choice. The decision was influenced in large part by Mr. Biden’s belief that he and Mr. Powell are philosophically aligned when it comes to keeping interest rates low and continuing to support the economy until more people are working and wages are rising.

On Monday, Mr. Biden said he believed the Fed had more work to do to get to “maximum employment.”

“That’s an economy where companies have to compete to attract workers, instead of workers competing with each other for jobs, where American workers get steady wage increases after decades of stagnation, and where the benefits of economic growth are broadly shared by everyone in the country, not just concentrated for those at the top,” he said.

Yet some economists, and many Republicans, say the Fed runs the risk of allowing inflation to spin out of control if it does not start to pull back efforts to fuel economic growth, with workers demanding increasingly higher wage increases to cover rising costs, resulting in 1970s-style inflation.

Mr. Biden has been suffering politically as prices rise for food, gas and airplane tickets. The president has repeatedly tried to reassure Americans that his economic policies will ultimately calm inflation, a message he is expected to repeat during remarks on Tuesday.

But his larger economic agenda has become tangled in the politics of price increases, particularly as the president pushes Senate Democrats to coalesce around a $2.2 trillion climate change and social policy bill that Mr. Biden says will ease inflationary pressures in years to come but Republicans warn will stoke higher prices immediately.

Mr. Biden said he was certain that both Mr. Powell and Ms. Brainard would work to stabilize inflation and keep the economic recovery on track.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/business/economy/fed-chair-jerome-powell-biden.html

Ms. Brainard has been a major proponent of a more active Fed role in making sure the financial system is prepared for potential fallout from climate change. She gave a speech at the Fed’s first climate-focused conference in 2019 and has recently focused on the need for climate scenario analysis for banks, which would test how well they would hold up amid extreme weather events, sea level change and other climate-tied risks.

As the sole Democrat left at the Fed board in Washington after 2018, Ms. Brainard used her position to draw attention to efforts to chisel away at bank rules, a process that was being driven by Randal K. Quarles, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, who is stepping down in December. In the process, she created a rare public disagreement at the consensus-driven central bank, dissenting from policy changes more than 20 times in 2019 and 2020.

Ms. Brainard often released detailed explanations of her dissents, laying out a road map of what changes were made and why they might be problematic. For instance, when the Fed streamlined its stress-test approach, she supported simplification in spirit — but disagreed with how it was done.

“Today’s rule gives a green light for large banks to reduce their capital buffers materially, at a time when payouts have already exceeded earnings for several years on average,” she said, publishing an analysis of how she came to that conclusion, one that Mr. Quarles disagreed with.

Her new position will not give her more direct say over financial regulation than she previously had — governors all have a single vote on regulatory decisions — but she and her record of dissents could be a resource for the new person coming into the vice chair for supervision job.

Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and chairman of the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, said Ms. Brainard had “spent her life fighting for a stronger, fairer economy.”

“At this moment, when workers are finally starting to see more power in our economy, we need a vice chair who understands that our economic recovery must strengthen our communities and put workers first,” Mr. Brown said in a statement.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/business/economy/lael-brainard-fed-vice-chair.html

“We’ve said numerous times: The pandemic is unprecedented and extremely complex — it was messy going into it, and it’s messy as we fight to emerge from it,” the president and chief operating officer of Southwest Airlines, Mike Van de Ven, said in a lengthy note to customers last month.

His apology came after Southwest canceled nearly 2,500 flights over a four-day stretch — nearly 18 percent of its scheduled flights, according to FlightAware — as a brief bout of bad weather and an equally short-lived air traffic control staffing shortage snowballed.

Weeks later, American Airlines suffered a similar collapse, canceling more than 2,300 flights in four days — nearly 23 percent of its schedule — after heavy winds slowed operations at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, its largest hub.

American and Southwest have said they are working to address the problems, offering bonuses to encourage employees to work throughout the holiday period, stepping up hiring and pruning ambitious flight plans.

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants, a union representing roughly 50,000 flight attendants at 17 airlines, gave the carriers good marks for their preparations.

“First and foremost, we are getting demand back after the biggest crisis aviation has ever faced,” she said.

“I think there has been a lot of good planning,” she added. “And barring a major weather event, I think that the airlines are going to be able to handle the demand.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/business/thanksgiving-holiday-travel-airlines.html

President Biden’s decision to renominate Jerome H. Powell to head the Federal Reserve reflects the president’s belief that despite high inflation, America’s economy still has a long way to go to deliver strong gains to women, Black and Hispanic Americans and low-wage workers trying to climb into the middle class.

Mr. Biden made clear during a White House appearance that he believes Mr. Powell is philosophically aligned with his vision that the central bank needs to keep interest rates low and continue supporting the economy until it reaches maximum employment.

“That’s an economy where companies have to compete to attract workers, instead of workers competing with each other for jobs, where American workers get steady wage increases after decades of stagnation, and where the benefits of economic growth are broadly shared by everyone in the country, not just concentrated for those at the top,” Mr. Biden said Monday.

The president’s decision is also based on his belief that Mr. Powell and Lael Brainard, the Fed governor whom Mr. Biden nominated for vice chair on Monday, share his views on stabilizing inflation while being careful not to snuff out the recovery before the labor market heals.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/business/economy/biden-powell-economy.html

Employees of federal contractors will make at least $15 per hour under a final rule that the Labor Department announced Monday, providing a likely wage increase for over 300,000 workers, according to administration estimates.

The wage floor will affect contracts that are executed or extended beginning on Jan. 30, 2022. The current minimum wage for contractors is $10.95 under a rule enacted by the Obama administration in 2014 and is scheduled to rise to $11.25 on Jan. 1. Both rules require that the minimum wage increase over time to account for inflation.

Paul Light, an expert on the federal work force at New York University, has estimated that five million people work for employers that have federal contracts, including security guards, food workers, janitors and call center workers, but most already make more than $15 per hour. The rule will also apply to construction contracts entered into by the federal government.

Labor Secretary Martin J. Walsh said in a statement that the rule “improves the economic security of these workers and their families, many of whom are women and people of color.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/business/economy/minimum-wage-federal-contractors.html