Wage growth remained relatively strong during the pandemic, at least compared with past recessions, when low-wage workers, in particular, lost ground. Many businesses that stayed open during last year’s lockdowns had to raise pay or offer bonuses to retain workers. Now, as the pandemic eases, companies are raising pay again to attract workers.

The question is whether the recent wage gains represent a blip or a longer-term shift in the balance of power between employers and employees. Figuring that out will be difficult because the United States lacks a reliable, timely measure of wage growth.

The Labor Department releases data on average hourly earnings as part of its monthly jobs report. But those figures have been skewed during the pandemic by the huge flows of workers into and out of the work force, rendering the data nearly useless. Economists are still watching industry-specific data, which should be less distorted. In particular, average hourly earnings for nonsupervisory leisure and hospitality workers should reflect what is happening among low-wage workers.

A better bet might be to wait for data from the Employment Cost Index, which is released quarterly. That measure, also from the Labor Department, tries to account for shifts in hiring patterns, so that a rush of hiring in low-wage sectors, for example, doesn’t show up as a decline in average pay. It showed a mild uptick in wage growth in the first quarter, but economists will be paying close attention to the next release, in July.

5. Everything Else

The indicators mentioned above are hardly a comprehensive list. The Producer Price Index provides data on input prices, which often (but not always) flow through to consumer prices. Data on inventories and international trade from the Census Bureau can help track supply-chain bottlenecks. Unit labor costs will show whether increased productivity is helping to offset higher pay. Economists will be watching them all.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/business/economy/us-economic-recovery.html

Two decades later, some start-up companies, including Boom and Spike Aerospace, are pushing ahead with new designs and plans.

Boom, which is working with Rolls-Royce, the British jet engine maker, said its plane would be more efficient than the Concorde; United estimates it will be 75 percent more efficient. Boom’s planes will not be as noisy as the Concorde because their engines will create a sonic boom only when flying over water “when there’s no one to hear it,” said Boom’s chief executive, Blake Scholl, who previously worked at Amazon and Groupon.

In recent years, many people have also grown increasingly concerned about air travel’s contribution to climate change. Supersonic jets are expected to use more fuel than regular jets per passenger per mile, according to experts.

Mr. Scholl said the engines on Boom’s planes would rely entirely on sustainable aviation fuel, which can be made from waste, plants and other organic matter. Experts say such fuel could reduce emissions, but its supply is limited, it is expensive and its use does not eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.

United said it was too early to know how much it would charge for the flights, which it would run out of its hubs in Newark and San Francisco to start. But another big question mark about the plane is how many people will be willing to spend the thousands of dollars that each ticket on a supersonic flight is likely to cost.

United has long focused on business travelers, including by adding flights to Israel, China and other destinations popular with executives and by offering more business class seats on its planes. Mr. Leskinen called the idea of supersonic travel a “really powerful tool for business.”

“You can have a business meeting and still be home to have dinner with your family,” he said.

But corporate and international travel is expected to rebound slowly from the pandemic, and some experts say it might not recover fully for years because companies have realized that they can be effective without as many in-person meetings.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/business/economy/united-airlines-supersonic-planes.html

That came as a surprise to economists.

Earnings growth typically slows sharply when unemployment is high, which it has been for the past 14 months. Many economists thought that would happen this time around, too. Instead, paychecks seem to have been resilient to the enormous shock brought on by the pandemic: Wage growth wiggled or fell early on, but has been gradually climbing for months now.

“It’s not necessarily going gangbusters, but it’s just higher than you would think” when so many Americans are out of work, said John Robertson, an economist who runs the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s widely used wage growth tracker. Payrolls are still down by 8.2 million jobs, although that number could fall when fresh data is released Friday.

Even workers with less formal education, who have experienced the worst job losses and still face high unemployment rates, have seen pay accelerate this year as economies reopen and employers struggle to hire. That’s according to the Atlanta Fed gauge, which is calculated in a way that makes it less susceptible to at least some of the composition issues plaguing other wage measures. A separate, quarterly measure of overall compensation costs has also held up.

The data, while messy, match anecdotes. Reports of labor shortages in service jobs that are newly reopening abound, and surveys show businesses and consumers becoming more confident that employee earnings will increase. Job openings have been surging, and the rate at which workers are quitting suggests that they have some room to be choosy.

Many employers, particularly in hospitality, have blamed generous unemployment benefits — now set at an extra $300 per week — for encouraging workers to stay home and making it harder for them to hire. More than 20 states, all led by Republican governors, have moved to cut off pandemic unemployment programs before their scheduled September end date.

Republicans have warned that as employers lift pay to attract scarce workers, they may be forced out of business or pass along added labor costs in the form of higher prices. That could turn an inflation surge now underway as the economy reopens into one that’s longer lasting.

But Democrats and many at the Fed think the risk of a persistent and rapid acceleration in prices is smaller, and many of them are embracing the apparent increase in pay and benefits as a long-awaited opportunity.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/business/economy/wage-growth-pandemic.html

“It bridged a gap,” Ms. Ray said, while she waited for slower forms of assistance, like rental aid.

Then she got cancer. To confirm the diagnosis and guide her treatment, she had to contribute $600 to the cost of a CT scan, which she did with the help of a payment in April totaling $2,800.

In addition to providing for the test, Ms. Ray said, the checks brought hope. “I really got down and depressed,” she said. “Part of the benefit of the stimulus to me was God saying, ‘I got you.’ Spiritual and emotional reassurance. It took a lot of stress off me.”

Scott Winship, who studies poverty at the American Enterprise Institute, questioned the reliability of the census data used in the University of Michigan study, noting that fewer than one in 10 of the households the government contacts answer the biweekly surveys.

He also argued that hardship would have fallen anyway, since the last round of stimulus checks coincided with tax season, which sends large sums to low-wage workers through tax credits. Between the earned-income tax credit and the child tax credit, a single parent with two children can receive up to nearly $8,500 a year.

Researchers at Columbia University estimate that poverty fell sharply in March, but Zachary Parolin, a member of the Columbia team, said that about half the decline would have occurred without the pandemic relief, primarily because of the tax credits.

Noting that the stimulus checks allocated as much to households with incomes above $100,000 as they did to those below $30,000, Mr. Winship called them inefficient and a poor model for future policy. “It’s not sustainable to just give people enough cash to eliminate poverty,” he said. “And in the long run it can have negative consequences by reducing the incentives to work and marry.”

Analysts have long debated the merits of cash versus targeted assistance like food stamps or housing subsidies. Cash is easy to send and flexible to use. But targeted benefits offer more assurance that the aid is used as intended, and they attract political support from related businesses like grocers and landlords.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/us/politics/stimulus-checks-economic-hardship.html

“The Restaurant at Meadowood Residency” began on March 3. Over the course of five weeks, it got the culinary equivalent of a standing ovation: all 44 dinners Mr. Kostow presided over at the Ojai Farmhouse sold out, including a finale weekend of meals in May that featured wine pairings from the renowned Krug Champagne house and Harlan Estate, a famed Napa Valley producer of Bordeaux-style blends. Tickets for that dinner cost $999 per person.

“They sold out within the first hour,” said Ben Kephart, the Ojai Valley Inn’s director of operations. “It’s crazy. That’s about as much as you can charge for a dinner anywhere. It shows you how much of a demand there is, and it speaks to people wanting to get out and support a venture that they feel is deserving.”

One of Mr. Kostow’s March dinners in Ojai offered 13 courses, several pours of wine, and, maybe most importantly, the opportunity to dress up and people watch (from well over six feet away). It felt like the opposite of sitting on the couch, numbly chewing Postmates by the glow of Netflix. Apparently, people want that.

“We could have had a month of these dinners, straight,” said Mr. Kephart. “That’s how many people tried to book them.”

Besides Mr. Kostow, the Farmhouse has played host to chefs such as Nancy Silverton, the grande dame of Italian food in Los Angeles. Next month brings David Castro, the chef of Fauna in Baja California, which was recently honored by World’s 50 Best, one of the hospitality industry’s major ratings organizations, as well as Neal Fraser, the owner of the revered eatery Redbird in Los Angeles.

Across the country and south of the border this summer and fall, similar guest chef-resort collaborations are in the works:

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/travel/hotel-fine-dining-chefs-covid.html

“Retailers were asking and requiring you to wear masks,” said Willy Solis, a shopper for the delivery app Shipt in Denton, Texas, who works in stores like Target, Kroger and CVS. “A large majority of people were still doing the right thing and wearing them.”

Since the C.D.C. announcement, however, “it’s been a complete shift,” Mr. Solis said. Denton, like Yorktown, sits in a county that supported former President Donald J. Trump by a single-digit margin in the November election.

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 97 percent of Democrats said in a March poll that they wore a mask “at least most of the time” when they might be in contact with people outside their homes, and a similar portion of Democrats said they believed masks limit the spread of coronavirus.

That compared with only 71 percent of Republicans who said they wore a mask outside the home at least most of the time, and just half said they thought masks were effective.

That suggests that a significant number of Republicans have worn masks only to comply with rules, not because they believed it was important, said Ashley Kirzinger, the Kaiser foundation’s associate director for public opinion and survey research. She cited polling showing that Republicans were also less likely to be vaccinated.

Matt Kennon, a room-service server at the Beau Rivage Resort and Casino in Biloxi, Miss., said that before the C.D.C. relaxed its recommendations, the resort’s policy was that all guests must wear masks in common areas unless they were eating, drinking or smoking, and that it was strictly enforced.

“There were several security checkpoints around the place where we’d have someone from security let them know, ‘Please put on a mask,’” said Mr. Kennon, a shop steward with his union, UNITE HERE. “There were stations with disposable masks for guests to wear in case they didn’t have one.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/business/retail-workers-cdc-mask-vaccinated.html

“To the extent you can keep reducing inventory, your books look good,” said ManMohan S. Sodhi, a supply chain expert at the City, University of London Business School.

From 1981 to 2000, American companies reduced their inventories by an average of 2 percent a year, according to one study. These savings helped finance another shareholder-enriching trend — the growth of share buybacks.

In the decade leading up to the pandemic, American companies spent more than $6 trillion to buy their own shares, roughly tripling their purchases, according to a study by the Bank for International Settlements. Companies in Japan, Britain, France, Canada and China increased their buybacks fourfold, though their purchases were a fraction of their American counterparts.

Repurchasing stock reduces the number of shares in circulation, lifting their value. But the benefits for investors and executives, whose pay packages include hefty allocations of stock, have come at the expense of whatever the company might have otherwise done with its money — investing to expand capacity, or stockpiling parts.

These costs became conspicuous during the first wave of the pandemic, when major economies including the United States discovered that they lacked capacity to quickly make ventilators.

“When you need a ventilator, you need a ventilator,” Mr. Sodhi said. “You can’t say, ‘Well, my stock price is high.’”

When the pandemic began, car manufacturers slashed orders for chips on the expectation that demand for cars would plunge. By the time they realized that demand was reviving, it was too late: Ramping up production of computer chips requires months.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/business/coronavirus-global-shortages.html

“We haven’t seen the demand yet,” said Joseph McLaughlin, research and evaluation director at the Boston Private Industry Council, which helps to place students into paid internships and helps others to apply to private employers, like grocery stores.

Ms. Sasser Modestino’s research has found that the long-running decline in teen work has partly come from a shift toward college prep and internships, but that many teens still need and want jobs for economic reasons. Yet the types of jobs teens have traditionally held have dwindled — Blockbuster gigs are a thing of the past — and older workers increasingly fill them.

Teenagers who are benefiting now may not be able to count on a favorable labor market for the long haul, said Anthony P. Carnevale, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

“There may be what will surely be a brief positive effect, as young people can move into a lot of jobs where adults have receded for whatever reason,” he said. “It’s going to be temporary, because we always take care of the adults first.”

Educators have voiced a different concern: That today’s plentiful and prosperous teen jobs might be distracting students from their studies.

When in-class education restarted last August at Torrington High School, which serves 330 students in a small city in Wyoming, principal Chase Christensen found that about 10 of his older students weren’t returning. They had taken full-time jobs, including working night shifts at a nursing home and working at a gravel pit, and were reluctant to give up the money. Five have since dropped out of or failed to complete high school.

“They had gotten used to the pay of a full-time worker,” Mr. Christensen said. “They’re getting jobs that usually high schoolers don’t get.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/business/economy/pandemic-jobs-teenagers.html

Still, for all of Mr. Biden’s forceful rhetoric — he once pledged to no longer allow “a narrow, cramped view of the promise of this nation to fester” — his administration made little effort on Friday to focus attention on that principle or to highlight details about how an equity-driven approach would change the way the government spends its money.

During a news conference to introduce the budget on Friday, Ms. Young and Cecilia Rouse, the chairwoman of the White House’s National Economic Council — both of whom are Black women — did not mention the president’s equity agenda until a reporter asked about it toward the end.

And the budget itself does not try to quantify the effect of following the president’s guidance to make decisions based on a sense of racial equity. There is no “equity” section of the budget. Aides did not send out fact sheets to reporters on Friday promoting the “equity spending” in the president’s inaugural budget.

That left some of the public relations work to civil rights groups and other advocates, who quickly pointed to examples of spending that would benefit communities who had traditionally been left behind by previous presidents.

Sara Chieffo, the chief lobbyist for the League of Conservation Voters, an pro-environment group, pointed to the $936 million Accelerating Environmental and Economic Justice initiative at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is aimed at cleaning up the environment in underserved communities.

“The importance of this administration’s proposal to make the largest-ever investment in communities of color and low-income communities who have been subjected to environmental racism for decades cannot be overstated,” Ms. Chieffo said.

Marcela Howell, the president of In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, praised the president for investing in programs that specifically benefit Black women.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/us/politics/efforts-to-advance-racial-equity-baked-in-throughout-bidens-budget.html

River Islands, the development where the Namayans hoped to live, is in Lathrop, Calif., which has a population of 25,000. It sits about a half-hour beyond Altamont Pass, whose rolling hills and windmills mark the border between Alameda and San Joaquin Counties. Though technically outside the Bay Area region, Lathrop’s farms and open fields have been steadily supplanted by warehouses and subdivisions as it and nearby cities have become bedroom communities for priced-out workers who commute to the Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

In Livermore, on the eastern side of Alameda County, the typical home value is nearing $1 million, according to Zillow. That falls to $500,000 to $600,000 over the hill in places like Tracy, Manteca and Lathrop. The catch, of course, is that many residents endure draining, multihour commutes.

The pandemic may have upended that economic order, in California and elsewhere. Thousands of families that could afford to do so fled cities last spring, and while some will return, others will not — particularly if they are able to continue to work remotely at least part of the time. One recent study estimated that after the pandemic, one-fifth of workdays would be “supplied remotely” — down from half during the height of the pandemic but far above the 5 percent before it.

If those trends hold, it will make it easier for many workers to live not just in farther-out towns like Lathrop but to abandon high-cost regions like the Bay Area altogether. Midsize cities that for years have tried — usually in vain — to recruit large employers through tax breaks can now attract workers directly.

“If Google moves to Cleveland, that’s great, but if one Googler moves to Cleveland, that’s also great,” said Adam Ozimek, chief economist of Upwork, a freelancing platform.

To some extent, the pandemic accelerated a shift that was already taking place. When the housing bubble burst, members of the millennial generation were in their teens and 20s. Now the oldest of them are turning 40, and about half are married. They are hitting the milestones when Americans have traditionally moved to the suburbs.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/29/business/economy/new-home-building-suburbs.html