The development is owed partly to a rebound in immigration as the United States has eased pandemic-related restrictions, cleared processing backlogs and enacted more permissive policies. Labor supply has also received a boost as some demographic groups — including women in their prime working years — have returned to the job market in bigger numbers than anticipated, pushing their employment rates to record highs.

That influx has made the Fed’s job a little less painful. Hiring has been able to chug along at a solid clip without further overheating the labor market because job seekers are becoming available to replace those who are getting snapped up. Unemployment has held steady around 3.5 percent, and some data even suggests that staffing is becoming less strained. Wage growth has begun to slow, for instance, and workers are no longer pulling such long hours.

“Monetary policy is part of the story to get demand moving towards supply, but any help we can get from supply increasing, that’s good news,” John C. Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an interview with The Financial Times this month.

Read it all.

The expanding supply of workers has allowed the Fed to accept the faster-than-expected hiring without slamming the brakes on the economy even more aggressively.

A Flood of New Workers Has Made the Fed’s Job Less Painful. Can It Persist? https://t.co/mvAz3MCsYF

— Sean Graf (@seangraf) July 24, 2023

An industrial arms race is under way. America welcomes it, saying the world needs green technologies and a diversified supply of chips. It is true that an ocean of public money is bound to accelerate the green transition and reshape supply chains in ways that should increase the security of democracies. Alas, the accompanying economic benefits being promised are an illusion. As we report this week, governments that subsidise and protect manufacturing are more likely to harm their economies than help them.

In ideal conditions, promoting manufacturing can add to innovation and growth. Towards the end of the 20th century South Korea and Taiwan caught up with the West thanks to the careful promotion of manufacturing exports. In industries like planemaking the enormous costs of entry and uncertain future demand can justify support for new firms, as when Europe backed Airbus in the 1970s. Likewise, targeted help can boost national security.

But today’s schemes are likely either to fail or to prove needlessly costly. Countries subsidising chips and batteries are not pursuing catch-up growth but fighting over cutting-edge technology. The market for electric vehicles and batteries is unlikely to become an Airbus-Boeing style duopoly. In the 1980s protectionists argued that Japan would dominate the strategically vital semiconductor industry, owing to its subsidised mastery of memory-chip making. It did not turn out that way.

Read it all (registration or subscription).

Governments are not wrong to pursue good jobs, the green transition or national security. But the potential for the manufacturing obsession to backfire is enormous https://t.co/BXCCBI1Ls0

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) July 16, 2023

The Hollywood actors’ union approved a strike on Thursday for the first time in 43 years, bringing the $134 billion American movie and television business to a halt over anger about pay and fears of a tech-dominated future.

The leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the union representing 160,000 television and movie actors, announced the strike after negotiations with studios over a new contract collapsed, with streaming services and artificial intelligence at the center of the standoff. On Friday, the actors will join screenwriters, who walked off the job in May, on picket lines in New York, Los Angeles and the dozens of other American cities where scripted shows and movies are made.

Actors and screenwriters had not been on strike at the same time since 1960, when Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films and Ronald Reagan was the head of the actors’ union. Dual strikes pit more than 170,000 workers against old-line studios like Disney, Universal, Sony and Paramount, as well tech juggernauts like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.

Read it all.

Breaking News: TV and movie actors are going on strike, joining Hollywood screenwriters and effectively bringing the entertainment industry to a standstill. https://t.co/QxBXrDR09t

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 13, 2023

Thousands of people are working at the run of new warehouses and manufacturing sites spreading throughout the Charleston region in recent years and all of them need to eat.

Trouble is, many of those industrial buildings are located in congested or out-of-the-way areas that aren’t close to quick and easy dining options, leaving workers with limited choices when it comes to grabbing a meal during a short lunch or dinner break.

Now some businesses are recognizing that a full-bellied employee can be more productive than one who’s going hungry, and they’re adding food to the list of perks that workers can take advantage of without having to leave the factory. While the meal offerings aren’t necessarily priced lower than what a worker could find elsewhere, the convenience can add up to dollars in terms of time and travel expenses that are saved.

Read it all.

Some businesses are recognizing that a full-bellied employee can be more productive than one who's going hungry and they're adding food to the list of perks that workers can take advantage of without having to leave the factory. https://t.co/n3AOlEI0xm

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) July 3, 2023

Groff argued that it was too difficult for employees to bring religious claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits workplace discrimination on various fronts, including religion.

The justices in a unanimous ruling written by conservative Justice Samuel Alito clarified a 1977 Supreme Court ruling called Trans World Airlines v. Hardison. The court said then that employers are not required to make accommodations if they would impose even a minimal or, using the Latin term preferred by the court, “de minimis,” burden.

That ruling built on the language of Title VII, which says an accommodation can be rejected only when there is an “undue hardship” on the employer.

The court on Thursday ruled that the hardship needs to be more than a minimal one.

Read it all.

The Supreme Court rules in favor of a Christian mail carrier who claimed the U.S. Postal Service did not do enough to accommodate his request not to work on Sundays in a case that will make it easier for employees to seek religious accommodations. https://t.co/mnNJqlWH88

— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 29, 2023

Now, experts say the phenomenon is finished. Ten straight interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve, slowing wage growth, stubborn inflation and mass layoffs in some industries may be causing Americans to stay put.

“The great resignation, by really any measure, is over,” said Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University who studies labor economics. The combination of a tight labor market and structural change from the pandemic catalyzed job reshuffling over the past three years, he said. “But that’s moved into the window of history now.”

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics bolsters Bloom’s observation: The number of people quitting their jobs fell by 49,000 in April compared to March, according to the most recent numbers available from the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

In fact, the so-called “quits” rate has steadily declined since last spring and is now virtually identical (just 0.1% above) the pre-pandemic rate in February 2020. Essentially, quits are back to the 2019 pre-Covid average.

Read it all.

Had a good run.@CNN @knowledge_vital https://t.co/V4U5WUYMvS pic.twitter.com/VskpOmuHPy

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) June 13, 2023

Experts say that even advanced AI doesn’t match the writing skills of a human: It lacks personal voice and style, and it often churns out wrong, nonsensical or biased answers. But for many companies, the cost-cutting is worth a drop in quality.

“We’re really in a crisis point,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at University of California in Los Angeles specializing in digital labor. “[AI] is coming for the jobs that were supposed to be automation-proof.”

AI and algorithms have been a part of the working world for decades. For years, consumer-product companies, grocery stores and warehouse logistics firms have used predictive algorithms and robots with AI-fueled vision systems to help make business decisions, automate some rote tasks and manage inventory. Industrial plants and factories have been dominated by robots for much of the 20th century, and countless office tasks have been replaced by software.

But the recent wave of generative artificial intelligence – which uses complex algorithms trained on billions of words and images from the open internet to produce text, images and audio – has the potential for a new stage of disruption. The technology’s ability to churn out human-sounding prose puts highly paid knowledge workers in the crosshairs for replacement, experts said.

Read it all.

Technology used to automate dirty and repetitive jobs. Now, artificial intelligence chatbots are replacing workers with high-paid jobs as well. https://t.co/oqqx1XJUem

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 2, 2023

In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.

In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which a population is stable. Today it is 2.3 and falling. The largest 15 countries by gdp all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate. That includes America and much of the rich world, but also China and India, neither of which is rich but which together account for more than a third of the global population.

The result is that in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand. By 2030 more than half the inhabitants of East and South-East Asia will be over 40. As the old die and are not fully replaced, populations are likely to shrink. Outside Africa, the world’s population is forecast to peak in the 2050s and end the century smaller than it is today. Even in Africa, the fertility rate is falling fast.

Read it all.

"The world's population could shrink for the first time since the Black Death due to declining fertility rates"

Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences https://t.co/HksCFeSrpN pic.twitter.com/JMCcDEXZKx

— Paul Kedrosky (@pkedrosky) June 1, 2023

ZENIT spoke with Father Tarcisio Giuseppe Stramare of the Congregation of Oblates of Saint Joseph, director of the Josephite Movement, about Tuesday’s feast of St. Joseph the Worker….

ZENIT: What does “Gospel of work” mean?

Father Stramare: “Gospel” is the Good News that refers to Jesus, the Savior of humanity. Well, despite the fact that in general we see Jesus as someone who teaches and does miracles, he was so identified with work that in his time he was regarded as “the son of the carpenter,” namely, an artisan himself. Among many possible activities, the Wisdom of God chose for Jesus manual work, entrusted the education of his Son not to the school of the learned but to a humble artisan, namely, St. Joseph.

Read it all.

Joseph the Carpenter
Georges de La Tour, c. 1645
Saint Joseph Feast pic.twitter.com/d5ijdfBFZv

— Marysia (@marysia_cc) March 20, 2023

Workers who have ever dreaded writing a briefing for your boss, building a digital presentation of your ideas or sifting through long email threads to get caught up on the latest projects may soon have some assistance — in the form of artificial intelligence.

At least that’s what Google aims to do for workers who use its suite of enterprise software tools called Google Workspace, which includes Google Docs, Google Sheets and Gmail. The tech giant plans to integrate its office products with generative AI that can do things like generate an entire document or create images based on a prompt. Workers will be able to access these capabilities by clicking a new wand icon that’ll appear in their apps.

Google plans to begin rolling out some features, starting with writing functions in Google Docs and Gmail, to select enterprise customers within the next couple of weeks, it said. It’s unclear when other features may become available.

Read it all.

Google Workspace, including Google Docs, Sheets and Gmail, will soon include generative AI tools that aim to aid with work. https://t.co/knON3lnVNg

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) March 14, 2023

“I think we might exceed a one-to-one ratio of humanoid robots to humans,” Elon Musk declared on March 1st. Coming from the self-styled technoking of Tesla, it was not so much a prediction as a promise. Mr Musk’s car company is developing one such artificially intelligent automaton, codenamed Optimus, for use at home and in the factory. His remarks, made during Tesla’s investor day, were accompanied by a video of Optimus walking around apparently unassisted.

Given that Mr Musk did not elaborate how—or when—you get from a promotional clip to an army of more than 8bn robots, this might all smack of science-fiction. But he has waded into a very real debate about the future of work. For certain forms of ai-enabled automation are fast becoming science fact.

Since November Chatgpt, an ai conversationalist, has dazzled users with its passable impression of a human interlocutor. Other “generative” ais have been conjuring up similarly human-like texts, images and sounds by analysing reams of data on the internet. Last month the boss of ibm, a computing giant, forecast that ai will do away with much white-collar clerical work. On March 6th Microsoft announced the launch of a suite of ai “co-pilots” for workers in jobs ranging from sales and marketing to supply-chain management. Excitable observers murmur about a looming job apocalypse.

Read it all.

Absolute levels of adoption of industrial robots remain low. Even South Korean firms, by far the world’s keenest robot-adopters, employ ten manufacturing workers for every industrial robot https://t.co/mwHsvq9LoZ

— The Economist (@TheEconomist) March 9, 2023

The Bible begins with the words “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”. One chapter later, we’re told that when God created the world he was “at work”. That the very first thing we learn about God is that he is a worker is very significant.

The nations around Israel believed that humans were created because the gods didn’t want to work – work was beneath them. But the Scriptures show us a God who works. Work is not an evil necessity but something associated with God’s character and so, when he creates humans and tells them to go and work in his garden, this is not a jail sentence but a privilege.

Genesis 2 also tells us that God rested. He worked and he rested, and in so doing established a pattern for us. Humans aren’t made for work alone but for work and rest. And as Hebrews tells us, rest is ultimately about our eternal relationship with God. We are made for the heavenly rest where we enjoy the presence of the living God and life full of joy and relationship in a renewed heavens and earth.

Against this backdrop we read that God created us. And there are two really important truths here. First, we are created in the image of God. And second, as those created in God’s image we are created specifically for work.

When God made men and women – to fill the earth and to rule over it – he gave us the privilege of working as his agents in his creation. It’s easy for us to miss the significance of this. Work is very, very good. Work is not the thing that you do to get to the good bits. There is something good about work, even when it’s very “worky”! Even when it’s tiring and difficult.

Read it all.

Joseph the Carpenter by Georges de La Tour, circa 1642.#YearofStJoseph pic.twitter.com/bzbZRYUnuk

— Brant Law (@Mr_BLaw) July 29, 2021

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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