Faye Johnson-Smith thought it was too good to be true when her boss said she could have every Wednesday off without a cut in salary.

Her firm was taking part in a six-month trial, testing the costs and benefits of a four-day week on full pay.

Like most of the workers involved, Faye was much happier working shorter hours.

But at the end of the trial almost all the 61 employers, which included a brewery and a fish and chip shop, were also keen to keep the new work pattern.

The scheme, organised by 4 Day Week Global, took place between June and December 2022, and involved organisations across the UK, including some non-profit organisations, as well as private firms in recruitment, software, and manufacturing.

A report assessing its impact has found it had “extensive benefits” particularly for employees’ well-being.

Read it all.

Big day for the #4DayWeek as we reveal that almost almost every company that took part in the UK four-day week pilot has decided to continue with it at the end of the trial.

Surely the time has now come to begin rolling it out across the country.https://t.co/nKWaPyoQOF

— Joe Ryle (@JoeRRyle) February 21, 2023

Workers of the world are more exhausted than ever.

More than 40% of people with desk jobs feel burned out at work, a pandemic-era high, according to a survey released Wednesday by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by Salesforce Inc.’s Slack Technologies. The pain is particularly acute outside the US, where the burnout rate has been rising enough to offset slight improvements seen by American workers.

Economic uncertainty, fear of job cuts and rising pressure to return to in-office work have added to workplace malaise, Future Forum researchers said. Women and younger workers, in particular, reported struggling with burnout.

Regional pressures are also getting people down. In the UK, strikes have crippled the country as public-sector unions protest what they see as paltry pay increases. Japan’s government has asked firms there to help workers cope with the highest inflation since 1981. French citizens have taken to the streets to protest the government’s plan to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62, which could result in some concessions around working from home, a government spokesman said earlier this week.

Read it all.

More than 40% of people with desk jobs feel burned out at work, a pandemic-era high, according to a survey.https://t.co/ygLR2uE8FI

— Bloomberg Law (@BLaw) February 15, 2023

Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria, is in the process of introducing new banknotes for the first time in more than 20 years. The move is an attempt to reignite confidence in the currency, the naira, which is under severe pressure. With inflation at more than 20%, people are struggling to cope with the rising cost of living. It is leading to the largest exodus of young professionals in years.

“Imagine going to the grocery store one day, and everything has tripled in price? How do you even cope? You have a family at home. What do you cut out of the budget?” Oroma Cookey Gam tells me by Zoom, her face incredulous.

The fashion designer left Nigeria’s biggest city, Lagos, with her young family a year ago for the UK capital, London. Her husband and business partner Osione, an artist, was granted a Global Talent visa, which enables leaders in academia, arts and culture, as well as digital technology to work in the UK.

She says it had become too expensive to raise their young family in Lagos. “Our money was buying us less and less. We weren’t able to pay our bills, we weren’t able to do normal things that we were doing.”

Oroma studied law at the UK’s University of Northumbria and moved back to Nigeria almost 20 years ago, keen to use her degree to help develop her country. Along with Osione, she eventually set up This Is Us, a sustainable fashion and lifestyle brand that uses local materials and artisans, including cotton grown and dyed in northern Nigeria.

Read it all.

Important piece.

“Despite having one of the largest health workforces on the continent, Nigeria's skilled health workforce density is only 1.95/1,000 population, well below the recommended benchmark”.

On brain drain @MayeniJones https://t.co/O9banuAPIw

— Ashis Basu (@BasuAshis) January 31, 2023

Millennials and Gen Z are less enthusiastic about having children than their parents. The reasons are many: financial, social, and biological, along with the preference among younger generations for “freedom.”

America’s falling fertility rates have been a cause for concern for several decades. During the Great Recession in 2008, millennials delayed marriage and having children, causing fertility rates to drop.

Then, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a short-lived “baby-bust,” when conceptions fell slightly. Months later, the rates rebounded but were inconsequential compared to the huge number of daily deaths.

Over the next few decades, demographers expect the population growth to decline further. But there’s one hope for increasing the U.S. population: immigrants.

A report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released Tuesday predicts that the nation’s population will near 373 million by 2053, up by almost 3 million from CBO estimates a year ago. The difference? An increase in immigrants over the next three decades.

Read it all.

The birth dearth is coming. And it's going to make the already tight labor market impossibly tight before long https://t.co/PRfYDqjxyz pic.twitter.com/NohDJvhlzq

— Alyson Shontell (@ajs) January 25, 2023

Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.

Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter.

One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.

For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.

Read it all.

High valuations in Silicon Valley made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly expanded market share. Not anymore, @DavidStreitfeld reports. https://t.co/rHsLe5mXfZ

— NYTimes Tech (@nytimestech) January 24, 2023

The corporate cafeteria can be an especially lonely place these days.

“You used to walk in at 12 o’clock on a Tuesday and stand in line to get something,” said Casey Allen, 46, who works for a division of the agricultural chemical company BASF in Raleigh, N.C. “Now, you walk in and you’re usually first in line.”

A paternalistic fixture of white-collar life born of the Industrial Revolution, the office dining room survived the midcentury move to sprawling suburban office parks. It weathered the rise and fall of cubicle culture and power lunches, and more recently, the lavish excess of the Silicon Valley office lunch.

But as the American office emerges from its pandemic slumber, can the cafeteria survive layoffs, a workweek that sometimes requires only a few days in the mother ship and a new, more demanding generation of employees?

Read it all.

Employees, especially younger ones, are demanding more culturally authentic meals and climate-friendly kitchen protocols, like reducing waste.

The Corporate Cafeteria Is Broken. So How to Feed Workers? https://t.co/CSz9fBWlSR

— Sean Graf (@seangraf) January 24, 2023

The farm labor history of California has often been told through the plight of agricultural laborers during the Depression era and the efforts, beginning in the early 1960s, of the United Farm Workers to improve working conditions of Mexicans in the fields.

But to Lloyd Barba, a professor of religion at Amherst College, this history isn’t complete without factoring in religion, particularly the stories of California’s Mexican farmworkers who embraced Pentecostalism, a Christian movement generally seen at the time as a “distasteful new sect” with “cultish and fanatical tendencies.”

“I think about how often Latino history is told as labor history, and that makes sense … but where are the laborers going?” Barba said. “If we’re going to get a more balanced and accurate Latino history, we have to look at Latino religious life.”

In his recently released book, Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California, Barba writes about the Mexican and Mexican American Pentecostal agricultural workers who built houses of worship in the state’s agricultural towns, who turned to “divine healing” for injuries they sustained working in the fields and whose worship style inspired civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to incorporate music and singing in his union organizing.

Read it all.

Pentecostal laborers built houses of worship, turned to “divine healing” for injuries, and inspired Cesar Chavez to incorporate music into his organizing.https://t.co/ZkaDRVxOPB

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) January 23, 2023

Hospital chaplains are witnessing acute stresses and strains in the NHS, in a ministry now as much geared to the needs of staff as of patients; current pressures were showing the value of that trend towards staff well-being, the president of the College of Health Care Chaplains (CHCC), Dr Simon Harrison, said on Monday.

“What Covid began is now very much continuing,” he said. “My colleagues and I are in emergency departments daily, visiting to support patients wherever they are found. There’s nothing we’re doing that’s new. Everyone is in different ways putting their hand to the pump.

“But what we learned from Covid is that you need to see staff where they are: to be alongside them on the front line. It’s not about waiting to be called, but about going out proactively to see how they’re doing on a good day or a bad day. The thing chaplains do which is relatively unique is brief encounters: a lot of these, in the moment — very real, confidential if required, but in the moment.”

Canon Mia Hilborn, a Hospitaller and chaplaincy team leader at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, in central London, described the added pressure from the sheer numbers in hospital, including many who no longer needed to be there. but had nowhere to go as a result of the shortage of workers in the care system.

“There’s a shortfall if everyone is well. But if they take leave or are off sick, then it’s a major shortfall,” Canon Hilborn said.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Care now needed for NHS staff, as well as patients, say hospital chaplains https://t.co/vYIDgJ7giJ

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) January 13, 2023

Nurses continue to garner the highest ethics rating from Americans among a diverse list of professions, a distinction they have held for more than two decades. The 79% of U.S. adults who now say nurses have “very high” or “high” honesty and ethical standards is far more than any of the other 17 professions rated. Still, the current rating is 10 percentage points lower than the highest rating for nurses, recorded in 2020, when they were on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic and their ethics ratings soared.

Two other health-related professions that enjoyed similar bumps in their ethics ratings in 2020 — medical doctors and pharmacists — now rank second and third behind nurses, with 62% and 58% of Americans, respectively, rating them highly. And like nurses, both of these professions’ ethics ratings dropped significantly in 2021 and edged down further this year. All three are now below their prepandemic levels.

Pharmacists, who typically earned higher trust ratings than doctors before 2013, have ranked slightly below that profession since the pandemic and now register their lowest ethics rating in four decades of measurement (58%) by one point. Medical doctors’ rating is at its lowest point since 1999 and nurses’ since 2004.

Read it all.

Americans continue to rate nurses as having the highest ethical standards among 18 professions, while telemarketers and members of Congress remain the lowest-rated fields. https://t.co/GBfOjuA3Q2

— GallupNews (@GallupNews) January 10, 2023

Midway through a mission to deliver food at George Mason University in Virginia, the little white robot paused. A throng of students headed its way, blocking its path to its destination. The robot weighed its choices: It could let the students pass, attempt a runaround, or try to barrel through. A few seconds elapsed, a decision was made. Whirring up again, the robot splintered the group as it trundled down the middle.

“Sometimes they’ll come at your legs a bit,” says Alice Christensen, an anthropology major who had just opened the lid of another robotic vehicle, taking out her Subway sandwich. Christensen, 22, often summons the vehicles, made by a start-up called Starship Technologies, to deliver food from a campus restaurant, using an app similar to Grubhub or Uber Eats. She doesn’t mind the fees, typically $2.50 a delivery, though she does get annoyed at the occasionally glitchy app and dozens of Starship vehicles that roam the campus, making hundreds of deliveries a day.

“They’re really convenient when you’re pressed for time, but they can be a nuisance,” she says.

Read it all.

https://t.co/EEEhtvRrc9

— Shehzad Younis (@shehzadyounis) December 23, 2022

This was supposed to be the year of returning to the office. The same could be said for 2021, and even the second half of 2020. The office seems to have become a place where we’re always “returning” but never quite “arriving.”

Although office occupancy rates have risen meaningfully, they are still nowhere near pre-pandemic norms in most of the country. In most big cities, offices are still empty more than half the time. Even in Austin, Texas — which has the highest occupancy rate among large cities, according to Kastle Systems badge-in data — workplaces are still much emptier than before the pandemic.

So, what have we learned about hybrid work over the past 12 months?

Hybrid work is the norm. The idea of a tug of war between managers and employees over spending time in the office has been a bit exaggerated. Polls have shown consistently that employees do value some degree of face time and want to be in the office roughly two days a week. Managers would prefer three. For those keeping score at home, that’s a difference of … one day.

“Overwhelmingly, managers are pretty much aligned with employees,” Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom says. The exceptions he has found are people who have “30-plus years of work experience, and have been very successful and have done that all in person … but they are real outliers.” Instead, most bosses are gradually becoming comfortable with managing and evaluating employees they don’t see every day — and not with creepy surveillance software, which Bloom dismisses as “awful.”

Read it all.

Hybrid work is the norm. The idea of a tug of war between managers & employees over spending time in the office has been a bit exaggerated: “Overwhelmingly, managers are pretty much aligned with employees,” Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom says https://t.co/1XHLXCawo6

— Jim Russell (@ProducerCities) December 22, 2022

NHS nurses are to strike over pay after members of the union representing close to half a million nurses across the UK were balloted.

More than 300,000 members were urged by the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to vote for strike action in the union’s biggest strike ballot.

The walkout is the first UK-wide strike action in the RCN’s 106-year history.

Industrial action is expected to be held before the end of the year at some of the country’s biggest hospitals, including Guy’s and St Thomas’ opposite Parliament, the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, University Hospital Wales and Belfast’s Royal Victoria.

The results of the ballot come amid a growing threat of strikes across the health service.

Read it all.

The walkout is the first UK-wide strike action in the Royal College of Nursing's 106-year history.https://t.co/hliLjyVsGm

— ITV News West Country (@itvwestcountry) November 9, 2022

Protect us, O Lord, and prosper us as we labour in our vocations, that our work may be done with Thy blessing and be crowned with Thine approval; through Him Who was numbered among the craftsmen, Jesus Christ our Lord.

–Frederick B. Macnutt, The prayer manual for private devotions or public use on divers occasions: Compiled from all sources ancient, medieval, and modern (A.R. Mowbray, 1951)

Jeder Tag ist ein neuer Beginn und gibt uns die Chance, heute etwas besser zu machen, als es uns gestern gelungen ist.
🧡🌻💚 Guten Morgen! 💙🍁🧡 pic.twitter.com/LarkI1KdFU

— Brigitta Neurauter (@BrigittaNeurau2) November 10, 2022

Employers across the country are worried that workers are getting less done — and there’s evidence they’re right to be spooked.

In the first half of 2022, productivity — the measure of how much output in goods and services an employee can produce in an hour — plunged by the sharpest rate on record going back to 1947, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The productivity plunge is perplexing, because productivity took off to levels not seen in decades when the coronavirus forced an overnight switch to remote work, leading some economists to suggest that the pandemic might spark longer-term growth. It also raises new questions about the shift to hybrid schedules and remote work, as employees have made the case that flexibility helped them work more efficiently. And it comes at a time when “quiet quitting” — doing only what’s expected and no more — is resonating, especially with younger workers.

Productivity is strong in manufacturing, but it’s down elsewhere in the private sector, according to Diego Comin, professor of economics at Dartmouth College. He noted that productivity is particularly tricky to gauge for knowledge workers, whose contributions aren’t as easy to measure.

Read it all.

Workers are “showing up late .. but companies can’t do anything about it because .. it is so hard to replace” them. “Back in 2019, the policy was one strike and you’re out .. Right now it’s 10 strikes, maybe you’ll be out.”@washingtonpost @taylormtelfordhttps://t.co/V438XJDg5C

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) November 1, 2022

Melding faith and work is nothing new, of course. Victorian Britain, for instance, produced many high-profile business leaders with a strong religious bent: men such as William Lever of Unilever fame (Congregationalist), the tourism entrepreneur Thomas Cook (Baptist) and the “chemist to the nation” Jesse Boot (Methodist).

Nor is it a solely Christian phenomenon. Strong faith positions inspire a host of business ventures around the world, from providers of Islamic finance and Buddhist healthcare to purveyors of Kosher foods and Ayurvedic medicine.

Yet the rise of the modern “profit for purpose” movement, to use Murray’s phrase, is inspiring a new generation of religious believers to connect the dots between their spiritual and professional lives.

There is a logical confluence between the two, says Rachael Saunders, deputy director at the Institute of Business Ethics, a UK charity that promotes high standards of corporate behaviour. Founders of companies or people appointed to senior roles “naturally reflect” on the difference they want to make, she adds.

“People for whom faith is important are likely to immediately see that contributing to society can be part of that, either because of their faith teaching or because they’ve seen their faith community play that role of service,” she says.

Read it all.

Faith at work: “As well as a powerful sense of purpose and internal harmony, some faith-driven entrepreneurs report finding a remarkable coherence between their religious tenets and the principles of sustainable business” https://t.co/QKJE6nxoOx

— john williams (@wi_john) October 31, 2022

Spiralling costs and staff shortages have forced the head teacher of a church school in Devon to ask his mother to help out as a lunch supervisor and to rope his sister in to do the cleaning.

The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has warned that schools are “cut to the bone”. The association has released data from a survey of its members, suggesting that 90 per cent of schools will go into deficit in the next academic year, and half expect to go into the red in the next 12 months.

The general secretary of the NAHT, Paul Whiteman, told the Observer on Sunday. “There are no easy fixes left. This will mean cutting teaching hours, teaching assistants, and teachers.”

Last week, Steve Hitchcock, the head teacher of St Peter’s C of E Primary School, in Budleigh Salterton, told the APEX news agency that there was nothing left to cut. The school was “constantly asking parents for money, constantly asking local groups, constantly trying to get money from any source”.

The school’s energy bills had doubled in the past six months, he said, while real-terms income had fallen by nine per cent in the past decade. Rising costs and diminishing income has left the catering budget £38,000 in arrears, and meant that the school was unable to give catering staff a pay rise in line with inflation.

Read it all.

The National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) has warned that schools are “cut to the bone”. A survey of its members suggests that 90 percent of schools will go into deficit in the next academic year; half expect to go into the red in the next 12 months https://t.co/kOBNbe0UOf

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) October 26, 2022

The strong late-pandemic labor market is giving a lift to a group often left on the margins of the economy: workers with disabilities.

Employers, desperate for workers, are reconsidering job requirements, overhauling hiring processes and working with nonprofit groups to recruit candidates they might once have overlooked. At the same time, companies’ newfound openness to remote work has led to opportunities for people whose disabilities make in-person work — and the taxing daily commute it requires — difficult or impossible.

As a result, the share of disabled adults who are working has soared in the past two years, far surpassing its prepandemic level and outpacing gains among people without disabilities.

In interviews and surveys, people with disabilities report that they are getting not only more job offers, but better ones, with higher pay, more flexibility and more openness to providing accommodations that once would have required a fight, if they were offered at all.

Read it all.

Workers with disabilities — like other groups that face obstacles to employment — tend to benefit disproportionately from strong job markets. Remote work, however, has the potential to break that cycle, at least for some, @bencasselman writes.https://t.co/3RZicpji8r

— NYT Business (@nytimesbusiness) October 26, 2022

Americans who are working from home have reclaimed 60 million hours that they used to spend commuting to an office each day. They’re now using that time to get more sleep instead.

That’s the takeaway from a research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which analyzed data from the American Time Use Survey to see what US workers spent their time on when they weren’t stuck on a crowded train or locked in traffic. The main findings: Employees spent fewer total hours working and substantially more on sleep and leisure.

Read it all.

Today's post (https://t.co/NzO7DjaAqp) examining how remote workers have allocated their time saved by not commuting informs a Bloomberg @business report. https://t.co/QBOvjo1chN

— NY Fed Research (@NYFedResearch) October 18, 2022

Doctors recruited from some of the world’s poorest countries to work in UK hospitals say they’re being exploited – and believe they’re so overworked they fear putting patients’ health at risk.

A BBC investigation has found evidence that doctors from Nigeria are being recruited by a British healthcare company and expected to work in private hospitals under conditions not allowed in the National Health Service.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has described the situation as “shocking” and says the sector needs to be brought in line with NHS working practices.

The BBC has spoken to several foreign medics – including a young Nigerian doctor who worked at the private Nuffield Health Leeds Hospital in 2021.

Augustine Enekwechi says his hours were extreme – on-call 24 hours a day for a week at a time – and that he was unable to leave the hospital grounds. He says working there felt like being in “a prison”.

The tiredness was so intense, he says, there were times he worried he couldn’t properly function.

Read it all.

Doctors from Nigeria have told the BBC they are being exploited in the UK, in an investigation that includes exclusive data from the British Medical Association.

Thread 🧵 1/ ⬇️https://t.co/8o4UaCYCA6

— BBC News Africa (@BBCAfrica) October 14, 2022

A new Amazon sorting facility in Woodbury, Minnesota, is taking its employees’ religious needs seriously, adding new “ablution stations” for ritual hand and foot washing and three rooms that people of any faith may use for prayer or meditation.

The 550,000-square-foot facility, which opened this month, employs about 300 Somalis and Somali Americans, many of them refugees from the generation-long civil war in the east African nation. Minnesota is home to as many as 80,000 Somali immigrants, more than half of those living in the United States. More than 99% of Somalians are Muslim.

A stop for packages moving between Amazon warehouses and their shipping destinations, the Woodbury center includes signs in Somali as well as translation services. Other accommodations for all employees include lactation rooms for nursing mothers and soundproof booths for phone calls.

Read it all.

A new Amazon site in Minnesota has taken steps to welcome Muslim employees, but a local leader says Amazon still has a way to go. “They are not trend leaders. They are catching up,” said @Jaylanihussein of @CAIRMN. https://t.co/s2xRyIrEjx

— Religion News Service (@RNS) October 14, 2022

An economic ennui has settled in among workers after the experiences of the last few years, said Julia Pollak, chief economist with ZipRecruiter, and that ennui is showing up in the numbers.

Nearly 20 million people were laid off in a matter of weeks as the pandemic took hold, regardless of whether they had strong work ethics, good performance or loyalty to a company. Then the economic winds shifted just months later, and companies were suddenly desperate to hire. Firings and layoffs reached historic lows. Existing employees were often worked to the point of burnout, newbies with less experience were brought on at a higher wage and employers overlooked things that could have cost workers their jobs in the past.

Workers came away from all of this feeling like the connection between working hard and being rewarded was broken, Pollak said.

“That’s really discouraging to top performers,” she added.

The result: This year, productivity — the measure of how much stuff companies produce for each hour we work — has seen the biggest drop on record.

Productivity is down 4.1% on an annualized basis, the biggest decline since the government started keeping track of the number back in 1948. Since then, U.S. productivity had been on a steady upward slope. Until now.

Read it all.

Job market swings over the past few years have dampened the motivation of many workers and led to a decline in productivity. Economists say that could have a profound effect on the country's well-being.https://t.co/zqIWkB9gv0

— NPR (@NPR) October 8, 2022

When Debbie Ricks lost her job as a server in March 2020, she decided to chase a long cast-aside ambition: She would try to become a photojournalist, and get away from her undertipping customers. Last year seemed to be the time for a professional leap.

She had unemployment checks coming in, $1,200 a month. She could supplement food stamps with the pasta and applesauce cans she found on the streets. Most important, every restaurant in Washington, D.C., seemed to be hiring; at any moment, she figured, she could line up a job. But this summer, as her savings dried up and the cost of food rose, she began to feel that many of those backup opportunities had evaporated.

“I do kind of feel like, ‘Oh, Debbie, you should’ve jumped on that,’” Ms. Ricks, 44, said. “But I wanted to get back into journalism, which is what I love.”

After months of a booming job market, which prompted workers to quit and raised wages across industries, the job openings rate declined in August. Layoffs rose slightly, to 1.5 million, though they were still below their historical average. With fears of a recession looming, workers who were flush with opportunities are beginning to feel the anxieties of tightened corporate budgets.

Read it all.

The Job Market Has Been Like Musical Chairs. Will the Music Stop?: https://t.co/kXOMZjalDA

— Cameron Sebastian (@crsfinance) October 7, 2022

It is hard not to feel a sense of foreboding. As the Federal Reserve has tightened policy, asset prices have plunged. Stocks, as measured by the Wilshire 5000 all-cap index, have shed $12trn of market capitalisation since January. Another $7trn has been wiped off bonds, which have lost 14% of their value. Some $2trn of crypto market-cap has vanished over the past year. House prices adjust more slowly, but are falling. Mortgage rates have hit 7%, up from 3% last year. And this is all in America—one of the world’s strongest economies.

Rising rates will slow the American economy and should break the back of inflation. But what else will they break? Since the Federal Reserve raised rates again on September 22nd, global markets have been in turmoil. When the British government announced unfunded tax cuts a day later, fire-sales by pension funds caused the yield on government bonds (or “gilts”) to spiral out of control. Contagion then spread to the American Treasury market, which is as volatile and illiquid as it was at the start of covid-19. The cost to insure against the default of Credit Suisse, a global bank, has risen sharply. These ructions indicate the world is entering a new phase, in which financial markets no longer just reflect the pain of adjusting to the new economic context—pricing in higher rates and lower growth—but now also spread pain of their own.

The most catastrophic pain is felt when financial institutions fail. There are two ways they do so: illiquidity or insolvency. Tighter monetary policy is likely to prompt or reveal both.

Read it all.

Rising rates will slow the American economy and should break the back of inflation. But what else will they break? https://t.co/9jMyduKXBk

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) October 5, 2022

Since the start of the 21st century, per capita growth dropped to less than half its previous 1950-2000 tempo. With the rate creaking along now at just over 1 percent per annum, incomes would take more than 60 years to double; from 1980-1999, the doubling pace was 31 years.

A significant factor in modern America’s slower growth — and the lower expectations it unforgivingly imposes — is the drop-off in work. The country is aging, of course, but population graying does not explain the collapse of employment for men of the 25-54 prime working age (women’s labor force participation rates have been declining too, but not as steeply). Nor can it account for the anomalous emergence of a peacetime labor shortage in post-pandemic America, even as workforce participation rates remain stuck well below pre-pandemic levels.

Instead, these are manifestations of a troubling, once unfamiliar but now increasingly entrenched syndrome. Call it the “flight from work.”

Although the unemployment rate for prime-age men in August was a mere 3 percent, only 86 percent reported any paid labor. The remaining 11 percent were labor-force dropouts — neither working nor looking for work. These “not in labor force” men, who now outnumber the formally unemployed by more than 4 to 1, are the main reason that the country’s prime male work rate has been driven below its 1940 level — when national unemployment rates were nearly 15 percent.

Astonishingly, yes, the United States has a Depression-scale work problem.

Read it all.

The United States has a Depression-scale work problem. The prime-age male work rate is below its 1940 level. Labor-force dropouts are the main reason, Nicholas Eberstadt of @AEI writes in a guest opinion. https://t.co/GIPxUJ4Df3

— Washington Post Opinions (@PostOpinions) September 21, 2022

Joseph White, who lives in Nashville, lost his job at Guitar Center six months into the pandemic. But he says he’d had enough: The store was constantly short-staffed and customers were intractable. In one instance, a shopper pulled a gun on him for trying to enforce the company’s mask mandate.

“I’m tired, I’m broken down, worn out and old,” the 62-year-old said. “I was worked to death for so long that finally, I said, there’s no way I’m going back.”

He’s begun drawing on Social Security payments to make ends meet, and helps his wife run her small shop, Black Dog Beads. But White says he has no intention of joining the labor force again.

“Our quality of life is far better even though we have less income,” he said. “I got tired of being a commodity.”

Read it all.

Reinvent jobs to be attractive to the 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 every day & the worker shortage is partially solved. Retirees will pursue encore work on their own terms, e.g, working remotely, 3-4 days a wk, unpaid leave opps, etc. #writingcommunity https://t.co/dDU79XuQRR

— J.B. Watson, Jr., Ph.D. (@GWashingtonInde) September 17, 2022

“Quiet quitters” make up at least 50% of the U.S. workforce — probably more, Gallup finds.

The trend toward quiet quitting — the idea spreading virally on social media that millions of people are not going above and beyond at work and just meeting their job description — could get worse. This is a problem because most jobs today require some level of extra effort to collaborate with coworkers and meet customer needs.

U.S. employee engagement took another step backward during the second quarter of 2022, with the proportion of engaged workers remaining at 32% but the proportion of actively disengaged increasing to 18%. The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees is now 1.8 to 1, the lowest in almost a decade.

The drop in engagement began in the second half of 2021 and was concurrent with the rise in job resignations. Managers, among others, experienced the greatest drop.

Read it all.

Is Quiet Quitting Real? Jim Harter via @GallupWorkplace https://t.co/wWFaPQp6gU •At least half of the U.S. workforce is quiet quitting
•The workplace, amid the pandemic, got worse for younger workers

— Kitty Wooley (@kwooleyy) September 6, 2022

For Theresa Clarke, a retiree in New Canaan, Conn., the rising cost of living means not buying Goldfish crackers for her disabled daughter because a carton costs $11.99 at her local Stop & Shop. It means showering at the YMCA to save on her hot water bill. And it means watching her bank account dwindle to $50 because, as someone on a fixed income who never made much money to start with, there aren’t many other places she can trim her spending as prices rise.

“There is nothing to cut back on,” she said.

Jordan Trevino, 28, who recently took a better paying job in advertising in Los Angeles with a $100,000 salary, is economizing in little ways — ordering a cheaper entree when out to dinner, for example. But he is still planning a wedding next year and a honeymoon in Italy.

And David Schoenfeld, who made about $250,000 in retirement income and consulting fees last year and has about $5 million in savings, hasn’t pared back his spending. He has just returned from a vacation in Greece, with his daughter and two of his grandchildren.

Read it all.

The poor are disproportionately affected by high inflation. They are *also* disproportionately affected by high unemployment — which is the likely consequence of the Fed's efforts to fight inflation.
My latest w/ @jeannasmialek:https://t.co/RpUDpci1e2

— Ben Casselman (@bencasselman) August 8, 2022

European workers have put in fewer hours than Americans for decades. Now, they are working even less than before the pandemic—almost one day a week less than Americans in 2021, according to data for the five biggest European Union economies.

Since the start of the pandemic, Americans have increased their working hours by about 1%, on average, while Europeans have trimmed theirs by around 2%, according to data about the five large EU economies from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.