He said Mr. O’Brien’s critique of the union’s efforts on Amazon was unfair. “No one was doing it a decade ago,” Mr. Hoffa said. “It’s more complex than just going out and organizing 20 people at a grocery store. He sounds like it’s so simple.”

Mr. O’Brien did not elaborate on his own plans for organizing Amazon, saying he wanted to solicit more input from Teamsters locals, but suggested that they would include bringing political and economic pressure to bear on the company in cities and towns around the country. The union has taken part in efforts to deny Amazon a tax abatement in Indiana and to reject a delivery station in Colorado.

Mr. O’Brien, who once worked as a rigger, transporting heavy equipment to construction sites, was elected president of a large Boston local in 2006. Within a few years, he appeared to be ensconced in the union’s establishment wing.

In a 2013 incident that led to a 14-day unpaid suspension, Mr. O’Brien threatened members of Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a reform group, who were taking on an ally of his in Rhode Island. “They’ll never be our friends,” he said of the challengers. “They need to be punished.”

Mr. O’Brien has apologized for the comments and points out that the reform advocate who led the challenge in Rhode Island, Matt Taibi, is now a supporter who ran on his slate in the recent election.

The break with Mr. Hoffa came in 2017. Early that year, the longtime Teamsters president appointed Mr. O’Brien to a position whose responsibilities included overseeing the union’s contract negotiation with UPS, where more than 300,000 Teamsters now work.

But the union relieved Mr. O’Brien of his position several months later, after he had sought to include critics of Mr. Hoffa on the bargaining team, including the head of a large Louisville local who had narrowly lost the Teamsters presidency to Mr. Hoffa in the previous election despite being considered a long shot.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/business/economy/teamsters-sean-obrien-hoffa.html

The Bank of England has said it expects inflation to peak at about 5 percent in the spring. “This period of higher inflation is likely to be temporary,” Andrew Bailey, the central bank’s governor, said this month. But there is “no fixed unit of time” that defines transitory, he said.

The central bank said that “it would be necessary over coming months” to raise interest rates if the economic data played out as policymakers anticipated, especially if the end of the government’s furlough program didn’t result in a large increase in unemployment. In the three months through September, the unemployment rate was 4.3 percent, 0.2 of a percentage point lower than in the three months through July, and early payroll data indicated that only a small number of people lost their jobs in October when the furlough program expired.

As the global economy emerged from successive lockdowns over the past year, supply bottlenecks, labor market shortages and other shortages have disrupted supply chains around the world. Policymakers are warning that the supply problems and the higher prices that result will last longer than they initially expected, adding pressure on central bankers to act more aggressively to stop inflation from getting out of their control.

In the United States, the Consumer Price Index jumped 6.2 percent in October from a year earlier, the fastest annual increase since 1990, and prices rose 4.1 percent in the eurozone last month, the fastest in 13 years. In China, the prices wholesalers pay to producers climbed to the highest in 26 years amid rising commodity prices and power shortages.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/17/business/britain-inflation.html

“I truly believe that 50 years from now,” he said, “historians are going to look back at this moment and say, ‘That’s the moment America began to win the competition of the 21st century.’”

Brian Deese, the director of Mr. Biden’s National Economic Council, said in an interview that the law would increase competitiveness and productivity through a variety of spending programs.

“This bill is going to be a game-changer in getting Americans to work,” Mr. Deese said.

He added that it would allow people to gain access to economic opportunities through better public transportation, roads and bridges, and provide high-speed internet, which he called “the lifeblood of the 21st-century economy.”

China’s large investments in its own infrastructure, and its threat to U.S. dominance in new and longstanding global industries, loomed large over the congressional negotiations that produced the law. Democratic and Republican lawmakers are more attuned than ever to Chinese spending, thanks to Mr. Biden and President Donald J. Trump, who both put competition with China at the center of their presidential campaigns last year.

Government investment in infrastructure and advanced industries has been key to China’s economic transformation to a country of skyscrapers and bullet trains from one of subsistence farming, bicycles and dirt roads only 40 years ago. Partly because of hefty government subsidies, the country manufactures more than half of the world’s steel and cement, most solar panels and a growing share of electric vehicles.

China spends more than 5 percent of its gross domestic product on infrastructure, far more than most developed countries and several times the proportion in the United States, where federal infrastructure spending is poised to grow to about 1.2 percent of gross domestic product in the coming years, according to the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

U.S. officials have accused China of seeking advantage through more nefarious means as well. Mr. Biden raised concerns about China’s “unfair trade and economic policies” in his virtual meeting with Mr. Xi on Monday, according to a White House readout of the call. Mr. Biden has chosen to maintain tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on China as retaliation against what his officials charged were intellectual property violations and other unfair trade behaviors.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/us/politics/biden-infrastructure-china.html

“It is a challenge,” Mr. Clayton said. “We’re all fighting and competing for those people who will sit behind the steering wheel.”

The infrastructure bill that Congress passed on Nov. 5 aims to remedy supply chain backlogs by investing $17 billion in American ports, many of which rank among the least efficient in the world.

The bill also includes funding to improve railways, roads and waterways, as well as a provision to fund pop-up container yards outside the Port of Savannah, in Georgia, to ease congestion. It will also lower the minimum age of truckers who can cross state lines to 18, in a bid to attract more workers to a profession that has become a key bottleneck in supply chains.

In September, the U.S. Department of Agriculture also announced it would dispense $500 million to help farmers deal with transportation challenges and rising materials costs.

John D. Porcari, the Biden administration’s port envoy, said farm exports are a “primary focus” for the administration, and that the White House was trying to encourage private sector companies, including ocean carriers, to get the supply chain moving.

The White House held a round table with agricultural exporters on Friday, and Mr. Porcari plans to visit the Port of Oakland, in California, one of the biggest export points for agriculture, this week.

“We know that some sectors have had more trouble than others, and we’re working to eliminate those bottlenecks,” Mr. Porcari said in an interview.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/14/business/economy/farm-exports-supply-chain-ports.html

Adding a few tenths of a percent to already high inflation might feel more meaningful, moving price gains farther from the Fed’s 2 percent goal.

Some economists have argued that as companies scramble for workers, prices rise and supply chains struggle to keep pace with booming demand, this is the wrong moment to hit the economy with any added juice.

“We don’t have a lot of spare capacity,” said Kristin J. Forbes, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We certainly don’t have a lot of spare workers today.”

Inflation looms more significantly in the near term because it is currently high, and if it remains that way for an extended period, consumers could change their behaviors and expectations, locking in faster gains. People who worry about the proposals say that 2022 is the wrong time to hand households more money.

Maya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said she was unsure whether the package would fuel inflation. But given the current pace of price increases, “you have to be more careful than you would be otherwise.”

The White House says the provisions of the bill that put money in families’ pockets, such as child care help, are not simple stimulus. They will allow caregivers into the labor market, they argue, an investment in the economy’s future that will allow it to produce more with time.

That makes the new program different from the spending passed earlier this year. The Biden administration increasingly acknowledges that sending households checks and offering expanded unemployment insurance supplemented savings, and that as households had more wherewithal to spend it helped to drive up prices.

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

Used car prices may not peak until April, said Jonathan Smoke, chief economist at Cox Automotive, which produces a closely watched index that tracks wholesale vehicle costs. After that, they’re unlikely to actually fall; they will just increase less quickly than their current breakneck pace.

At #1 Cochran Subaru Butler County, a car dealership in western Pennsylvania, the general sales manager, Jim Adams, is offering a $500 bonus to customers who return leased vehicles early, and buying cars that people bring in for repairs. He is asked a few times a day when things might normalize.

“Until the manufacturers can get back up to speed, used car prices will continue to grow,” Mr. Adams said in an email.

As industries wait for balance to return, Republicans are pointing fingers at Mr. Biden and Democrats, saying the stimulus checks they provided to households and other pandemic-related benefits are responsible for the rise in prices.

The White House has tried to emphasize that prices are jumping while the country is staging a rapid economic rebound from a once-in-a-century disaster. And Mr. Biden has said his new policies, including an infrastructure bill that cleared Congress last week, will over time expand capacity and help to cool inflation.

But the president made clear on Wednesday that the onus for taming inflation rested with the Fed. “I want to re-emphasize my commitment to the independence of the Federal Reserve to monitor inflation, and take steps necessary to combat it,” Mr. Biden said in his statement.

At the Fed, some officials are already warning that the central bank may need to pull back economic support faster. Doing that could cool down prices by tempering demand, but would also weaken the job market when millions remain out of work compared with prepandemic employment levels.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/business/economy/consumer-price-inflation-october.html

The directors of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach said that, at least initially, few additional truckers were showing up to take advantage of the extended hours.

Gene Seroka, the executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said his port had told the White House in July that about 30 percent of the port’s appointments for truckers went unused every day, largely because of shortages of drivers, the chassis they use to pull the loads and warehouse workers to unload items from trucks.

“Here in the port complex, with all this cargo, we need more drivers,” Mr. Seroka said.

The $1 trillion infrastructure bill that the House passed last week could help mitigate the shortage. The legislation includes a three-year pilot apprenticeship program that would allow commercial truck drivers as young as 18 to drive across state lines. In most states, people under 21 can receive a commercial driver’s license, but federal regulations restrict them from driving interstate routes.

But industry experts said the program was unlikely to fix the immediate problem, given that it could take months to get underway and the fact that many people simply do not want to drive trucks.

Mr. Biden said last month that he would consider deploying the National Guard to alleviate the trucker shortage, although a White House official said the administration was not actively pursuing the move.

Meera Joshi, the deputy administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, said the agency had focused on easing the process of obtaining a commercial driver’s license after states cut back licensing operations during the coronavirus pandemic. The agency has also extended the hours that certain drivers can work.

“They are the absolute backbone of a big part of our supply chain,” Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, said about truckers at a White House briefing on Monday. “We need to respect and, in my view, compensate them better than we have.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/us/politics/trucker-shortage-supply-chain.html

Last week, the Biden administration released 90 percent of the $3.75 billion in funds dedicated to the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provided an average of $439 to more than five million families the year before the pandemic. It received $4.5 billion in additional emergency grants this year. Usually, funding for the program isn’t released until all budget items for the fiscal year are approved, but Congress recently made an exception as cold months approached and sparring over spending bills continued.

Mr. Wolfe’s group has urged Congress to include $5 billion more for the program in the social safety net package being negotiated in Washington.

The increase in home heating costs is sure to hover over economic debates in Washington about inflation. White House allies, fighting to push through the president’s sweeping agenda, assert that the current surge in consumer prices mostly reflects pandemic disruptions that will dissipate next year. Federal Reserve officials, who have been trying to put in place a policy framework less keenly sensitive to inflation, will be pushed to gauge whether that contention is well founded.

The latest outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration suggests a decent chance of a milder-than-average winter. But according to projections by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, if winter is somewhat colder than usual, energy bills could rise 15 percent for households heated by electricity, 50 percent for those depending on natural gas and 59 percent for those that mostly use heating oil. Propane users would be in for the biggest blow — a 94 percent increase, or potentially hundreds of dollars over the six-month heating season.

As with other price shocks stemming from the pandemic, the pain will be particularly acute for those of limited means. Twenty-nine percent of those surveyed by the Census Bureau have reported reducing or forgoing household expenses to pay an energy bill in the last year.

Before the pandemic, Jamillia Grayson, 43, of Buffalo, had a successful event-planning business. Her work dried up, and even with unemployment insurance, she couldn’t meet household expenses while supporting her 8-year-old daughter, who has sickle cell anemia, as well as an older aunt, who depends on a home oxygen tank and lives with them.

Electricity and gas bills piled up throughout this year, and by the end of the summer, she owed $3,000, she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/business/economy/home-heating-prices-winter.html

“That visibility is what we need,” said Hassane El-Khoury, chief executive of the chip maker Onsemi, a company previously known as ON Semiconductor.

Many of the chip makers said they were using their new power with restraint, helping customers avoid problems like factory shutdowns and raising prices modestly. That’s because gouging customers, they said, could cause bad blood that would hurt sales when shortages end.

Even so, the power shift has been unmistakable. “Today there is no leverage” for buyers, said Mark Adams, chief executive of Smart Global Holdings, a major user of memory chips.

Marvell Technology, a Silicon Valley company that designs chips and outsources the manufacturing, has experienced the change in power. While it used to give foundries estimates of its chip production needs for 12 months, it began providing them with five-year forecasts starting in April.

“You need a really good story,” said Matt Murphy, Marvell’s chief executive. “Ultimately the supply chain is going to allocate to who they think are going to be the winners.”

It’s a substantial change in psychology for a mature industry where growth has generally been slow. Many chip makers for years sold largely interchangeable products and often struggled to keep their factories running profitably, particularly if sales slumped for items like personal computers and smartphones that drove most chip demand.

But the components are essential for more products now, one of many signs that rapid growth may linger. In the third quarter, total chip sales surged nearly 28 percent to $144.8 billion, the Semiconductor Industry Association said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/technology/computer-chip-shortage.html

In stores, Mr. Smith said, “we have changed our shift structure so you can do two- or four-hour shifts” in an attempt to “make it a lot easier if you’re juggling family responsibilities.”

The company has also sought to emphasize its unique benefits, including several paid days off for employees to pursue outdoor experiences.

The challenge of finding workers has put a spotlight on how difficult many retail jobs are and on the short shrift given to many store workers during the worst of the pandemic. They were regularly exposed to Covid-19 and involved in customer conflicts around wearing masks, and they were inconsistently offered hazard pay or other compensation for their efforts. Many retail workers said that they were not properly informed when they were exposed to the virus in stores.

Anthony Stropoli, a personal shopper at Bergdorf Goodman, holds one of the lucrative, client-facing jobs that have been fading in retail in recent years and he noted that luxury retail was a different ballgame. He previously worked at Barneys New York, which filed for bankruptcy in 2019.

“A lot of people do not want to work in retail right now — I really, really see it,” Mr. Stropoli said. “People are not feeling appreciated or fairly compensated, and I think this whole Covid thing has made them really rethink that. They want to feel valued.”

It all means that workers have more leverage this season than they have in the past. Joel Bines, global co-leader of the retail practice at the consulting firm AlixPartners, said if retailers want to find enough workers this season, they need to pay them more and fundamentally improve working conditions.

“For retailers, who have treated their workers as dispensable cogs in order to increase the bottom line, to say they are shocked that they can’t find people to work for them is hard to believe,” Mr. Bines said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/business/retail-hiring-holidays-workers.html