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Business Journals
3 days ago
- Business
- Business Journals
Gen Z more interested in trade careers; dress codes change post-pandemic
Editor's Note: Welcome to The Playbook Edition, a look at stories, trends and changes that could affect your business. Want more stories like this in your inbox? Sign up for The Playbook newsletter. GET TO KNOW YOUR CITY Find Local Events Near You Connect with a community of local professionals. Explore All Events Here's why Gen Zers are increasingly drawn to trade careers Some Generation Z adults are becoming more interested in trade careers as economic pressures mount and concerns about artificial-intelligence tools persist. That's according to a recent survey from Resume Builder, which found 42% of Gen Zers are working in or pursuing a skilled-trade job, including 37% of those with a bachelor's degree. The report surveyed 1,434 adults ages 18 to 28. Regardless of education level, Gen Z men surveyed were significantly more likely than women to choose trade careers, with 48% of men saying they worked in or planned to enter the trades, compared to 30% of women. Top factors cited for choosing work outside of white-collar professions included avoiding student-loan debt and reducing the potential risk of being replaced by AI tools. The shift, according to the report, is especially prevalent among Gen Z men with degrees, as 46% of them are working in or pursuing trades compared to 27% of women with degrees. Key quote: "More Gen Z college graduates are turning to trade careers and for good reason. Many are concerned about AI replacing traditional white-collar roles, while trade jobs offer hands-on work that's difficult to automate. Additionally, many grads find their degrees don't lead to careers in their field, prompting them to explore more practical, in-demand alternatives." — Resume Builder's Chief Career Advisor Stacie Haller FULL STORY: Here's why Gen Zers are increasingly drawn to trade careers Casual dress codes were a post-pandemic perk. That's starting to change. Companies have pulled back on advertising casual dress codes in 2025, but that doesn't mean the days of relaxed in-office attire workers have enjoyed post-pandemic are coming to an end. The Playbook's senior reporter Andy Medici writes that an analysis of job postings by job-matching platform Adzuna that was shared exclusively with The Playbook found the percentage of listings in April that mentioned a casual dress code came in at 61.1%, the lowest April figure since the onset of the pandemic. In April 2019, casual dress code mentions were part of 58.5% of job listings. Per Medici, that number rose to 63% in April 2020 and reached a peak of 80.6% in April 2022 before coming back down. Medici notes that references to business-casual dress codes, which stood at 40.2% of job postings in April 2019, fell all the way to 18.6% of job postings in April 2022 before rising back up to 37.2% this year, according to Adzuna. Key quote: "During the pandemic, it was common for employers to advertise casual dress and remote work to attract candidates. But now that casual dress has become the standard, companies no longer feel it's necessary to drive recruitment. So even though fewer job listings directly advertise their casual dress code, it's still very much the standard in most workplaces." — Sam Debase, a career expert at ZipRecruiter FULL STORY: Casual dress codes were a post-pandemic perk. That's starting to change. Office returns are hitting their new normal As more corporate titans have pushed for employees returning to the office in 2025, the rate of in-person work is inching toward pre-pandemic levels in some major metros. The Business Journals' Joanne Drilling writes that April 2025 was the third-busiest in-office month since the pandemic — outpaced only by October and July 2024 — with office visits down 30.7% nationally compared to April 2019. The data comes from the most recent Nationwide Office Building Index, which leverages cellphone location data to analyze foot traffic and visits from about 1,000 office buildings across the country. Despite the robust traffic numbers recorded in April, a full return to pre-pandemic visitation levels hasn't yet materialized in most cities, Drilling notes. Key quote: "Consumers are just not spending 40 hours a week in the office. They're still embracing this hybrid model, but with a lot of companies heading into the office, we have some improvement in the percentage of visits compared to pre-pandemic levels." — R.J. Hottovy, head of analytical research at FULL STORY: Office returns are hitting their new normal The blitz: Workers feel stigma around disability accommodations has worsened … The pay raise picture is shifting. Here's where wages are rising the most. … SBA launches portal to boost Made in America Manufacturing Initiative … SBA overhauls another loan program amid rising defaults
Yahoo
19-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Pope Leo's Election Is a Victory for the Constitution
I still cannot quite believe that there is an American pope. Two hundred and sixty-seven men have served as the bishop of Rome over the last two thousand years. There have been Medici popes and Borgia popes, warrior popes and scholar popes, wise ones and venal ones—and now, there is one from Chicago. Leo XIV, formerly Robert Prevost, is now the spiritual head of roughly 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. He is the most powerful American in history who was not elected to the White House. And while Leo was the bishop of a Peruvian diocese, not an American one, his elevation is still a triumph for American Catholics who have often been regarded with suspicion and skepticism by the church's leadership. For the United States itself, this is an unqualified triumph of religious pluralism. Leo XIV is the first pontiff to hail from a country that is not majority-Catholic since the emergence of the modern nation-state. The election of an American pope—and the nation's warm reaction to it—is also a fitting coda to two centuries of anti-Catholic animus in American society. I am also not surprised that baseball, the great pluralizer of the nation, played a role in this story. Two or three generations ago, the election of an American pope would have led to protests and perhaps even riots. In 2025, it instead led to frenzied speculation about his Chicago sports affiliations. In the initial wave of reports, some outlets made a mistake. 'Whoever said Cubs on the radio got it wrong,' his brother John told an NBC Chicago reporter. 'It's Sox.' Journalists and social-media commentators knew what that meant: this is a pope who knows what suffering looks like. The Chicago White Sox is one of baseball's oldest clubs—and among its least successful. Even their victories do not lend themselves to boasting and braggadocio. The uninspiring 1906 roster that won the Sox's first World Series title became known as the 'Hitless Wonders' for their poor batting average. They prevailed in six games only because their opponents, the cross-town rival Cubs, somehow fared even worse. The Sox's second title in 1917 against the New York Giants brought a little more respectability to the club. So did emerging stars like 'Shoeless' Joe Jackson, who returned from service in World War I to post a .350 batting average in 1919. But their glory was soon overshadowed in popular memory by the tragedy of that year's World Series, where a group of Sox players, underpaid by their penny-pinching owner Charles Comiskey, conspired with gamblers to throw the series to the Cincinnati Reds. The scheme worked, but the resulting scandal changed baseball forever. Owners responded to universal public dismay by creating a commissioner's office to oversee both the American and National Leagues, investing it with near-dictatorial power over players, managers, and clubs. Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the first high priest of the national pastime, immediately excommunicated Jackson and seven other 'Black Sox' players from baseball for the rest of their lives. Baseball has a thing about curses and championship droughts. The Red Sox kept falling short because they shipped Babe Ruth—who credited his hitting style to the Xaverian teacher who introduced him to the sport at his Catholic boy's school—off to the rival Yankees in December of 1919. The Cubs went 108 years without a championship because, it was said, of some dust-up involving a local tavern owner and his goat. For the White Sox, however, the 'curse' seemed to come not from some disaffected former player or disgruntled local figure, but from their own team's sins against baseball itself. So it was perhaps fitting that the future pope was there on October 22nd when the White Sox won the first game of the 2005 World Series, eventually sweeping the Houston Astros in four games. It was not the greatest curse broken this century: the Red Sox's 2004 victory was even more stunning, and the Cubs' 2016 championship even more historic. But it was just as cathartic, giving the long-suffering franchise something to venerate whenever the team struggled and ownership, as always, refused to spend. (Good luck moving the team to Nashville now, Jerry Reinsdorf.) As a native son of Chicago's South Side, Leo was undoubtedly familiar with the inequalities that Catholic social teachings oppose. Baseball could only have sharpened it. No other American sport reflects the contradictions and fissures of modern life: the perpetual struggle between hard-won merit and unequal wealth, the brow-sweat of labor and the idle vanity of ownership, the national pastime that excluded part of the nation for decades. It is often described as a game of failure, where the best batters often fail to reach first base and the best pitchers rarely throw shutouts. It holds a sacred status in American life that endures despite the many sins of its past: gambling and bigotry, cheating and theft. Augustine of Hippo would have probably loved it. What could be more appropriate for and representative of, he might say, this fallen, failed world? Perhaps that is why when popes come to the United States to hold large open-air masses, they tend to borrow our cathedrals. Paul VI, the first pontiff to visit America, celebrated Mass with 100,000 attendees at Yankee Stadium, baseball's de facto national basilica, in 1965. The Archdiocese of New York even paid rent to avoid a church-state separation issue with its use of the stadium. (Like Old St. Peter's, the House that Ruth Built was later razed to make way for its current, more grandiose replacement, which hosted Benedict XVI in 2008.) When John Paul II came to Los Angeles in 1987, he celebrated Mass at two separate stadiums. At the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum it was reportedly a grim, troubled affair. Football gridirons are centers of strife and dominance; a Hail Mary pass is typically the only instance of piety during a game. 100,000 ticket-holders waited in hours-long lines to gain entry. People collapsed from stress and heat exhaustion, and fights reportedly came close to breaking out. But Dodger Stadium had a more euphoric atmosphere where, as The Los Angeles Times reported, the spirit was 'not deference but joy.' The ballpark had already been nicknamed 'Blue Heaven on Earth' by Tommy Lasorda, the team's voluble longtime manager and a devout Catholic who had priests celebrate Mass on-site for players before Sunday games. The name stuck for aesthetic reasons, but is also fitting for theological ones. Baseball, more than anything else, is about going home. The United States has always been home to Catholics, but it has not always been friendly to them. Many colonial Americans inherited the prejudices of their early modern English forebears, who associated the Catholic faith with religious strife, foreign subversion, and continental adversaries like France and Spain. Stuart-era reforms to the Church of England, for example, prompted thousands of English Puritans to resettle in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By the time of the revolution, American leaders had embraced religious freedom and church-state separation as an antidote to the religious conflicts that had riven Europe for the previous two centuries. Though the new nation was largely Protestant, early presidents treated Catholics with respect. 'I presume that your fellow-citizens will not forget the patriotic part which you took in the accomplishment of their revolution, and the establishment of their government,' George Washington wrote to American Catholics in 1790, 'or the important assistance which they received from a nation in which the Roman Catholic faith is professed.' But the 19th century proved that anti-Catholicism could still be a potent political force in American life. It fueled the Know-Nothings of the 1840s and 1850s, who claimed that new immigrants would be more faithful to Rome than to the Constitution, subverting and supplanting the existing Protestant majority. It influenced Republicans in the 1870s and 1880s who opposed parochial schools, where American children would supposedly be taught an alien and un-American ethos. The Catholic Church had its own skepticism of the United States as well. The revolutions and radical movements of 19th-century Europe put the church's leaders on a conservative, defensive footing—sometimes literally, as when Italian nationalists invaded and annexed the Papal States in 1870. Modernism, liberalism, and secularism were denounced as adversaries to the church's teachings and its privileged place in countries like France, Italy, and many of the smaller states that would become Germany. Pope Leo XIII, the current pontiff's namesake, praised Americans' 'well-ordered republic' in a 1895 letter to the U.S. bishops for allowing Catholics to 'live and act without hindrance.' At the same time, he warned it would be 'very erroneous to draw the conclusion' that American civil secularism was 'the most desirable status of the Church, or that it would be universally lawful or expedient for State and Church to be, as in America, dissevered and divorced.' European bishops, in other words, better not get any funny ideas from the New World. That skepticism, for lack of a better word, manifested itself in the church's approach to its American brethren. American Catholics were often perceived to be more liberal, more open-minded, and more questioning than their overseas counterparts. The common belief among Vaticanologists, at least until two weeks ago, was that an American would never become pope because cardinals from other countries thought that the United States already held too much power on the world stage. Anti-Catholicism peaked in America in the 1920s, when the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan marched in public without fear and Al Smith, the first Catholic major-party presidential candidate, lost the 1928 election amid smears that he would make Washington subordinate to Rome. The Vatican reconciled itself with the United States more formally in the 1930s as the world war neared, but signs of the old arm's-length treatment remained. There would not be an American ambassador to the Holy See, for example, until 1984. Political, social, and religious realignments in this country have since made organized and overt anti-Catholicism untenable. Christianity's various denominations now believe that they have more in common with each other than with secularism, as shown by the rise of the religious right in the 1980s. For the first half of this decade there was simultaneously a Catholic president, a Catholic speaker of the House, and a Catholic majority on the Supreme Court. Few noticed and no one really cared. The Constitution endured. Leo's approach to theological and pastoral questions—on engaging with LGBTQ and divorced Catholics, on synodality and the role of women and the laity in the church, on far-right leaders like Donald Trump and extreme concentrations of wealth—will emerge more fully with time. For now, the nation is content to speculate about the pope's views on the designated hitter and the infield-fly rule. In a time when the American constitutional order is under constant threat, the demise of an ancient prejudice—and a victory for American pluralism—is worth celebrating.
Irish Examiner
17-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Examiner
Cork Antique Fair returns to a spacious new venue outside Fermoy
Stained glass from Birr Castle, the 1851 Plan of Cork by John Tallis, affordable antique furniture, new Irish art and vintage fashion can all be found at the Cork antique fair in Fermoy on Sunday week (May 25). After an absence of five years, Hibernian Antique Fairs will return to a new venue in Cork for a full-to-the-brim event with 40 dealers from around Ireland. It will be held at the Corrin Event Centre, three miles from Fermoy and just off exit 15 on the M8. There is ample space and lots of available parking for what promises to be a great day out. In a city still waiting for its event centre, the ever-popular Cork Antique Fair outgrew its previous locations and came to an end. Finding somewhere to host it has been difficult. In contrast, the antique fairs at spacious Limerick Racecourse have repeatedly demonstrated strong demand and an appetite for more, which speaks to the resilience of the antique trade in turbulent economic times. At the Cork Antique Fair this 1851 Map of Cork with insets shows just how much the city has grown. At fairs in Limerick and Kerry, organiser Robin O'Donnell is often asked when will he return to Cork. Now that the multi-purpose Cork Marts complex has become available, the answer should be more often than before. In advance of the first fair at Corrin, he is already planning another in October. The market is continually evolving as collecting habits change. Unusual one-off items are highly collectable and Norman Allison of Annamoe Antiques will present two windows in solid oak frames from Birr Castle. These are accompanied by an original 1983 receipt from Mike McGlynn Antiques, Bunratty, Co Clare, in which he states that the c1835 stained glass panels were by the Earl of Rosse. Vintage headwear from Eily Henry at the Cork Antique Fair. The second earl, friend of Wolfe Tone and a critic of absentee landlords, wasthe father of astronomer William Parsons, 3rd Earl, who in 1845 built what was then the world's largest telescope in Birr. Collectors will be interested in an 1851 Plan of Cork by John Tallis, a pair of neoclassical 19th-century bronze Medici urns on Siena marble plinths and a sixth-century Limoges grisaille enamel plaque of a shepherdess. Treasures of Athlone will bring new art by James Brohan and the Purple Onion Gallery will offer a mix of contemporary art, photography, whiskey, wine and cigars. An elaborate Limoges plaque depicting a shepherdess at the Cork Antique Fair. Vintage hats to catch the eye can be found at Eily Henry's stand, and Eddie Moylan will bring some affordable gold jewellery. Greenes of Drogheda, Vintage Velvet and Raymond Byrne are among those offering antique furniture and a selection of smaller antique pieces which can be carried home along with everything from vintage toys to bullion to coins and banknotes. It all adds up to a great day out enhanced by a sense of exploration and inspiration.
New York Post
09-05-2025
- Business
- New York Post
Michael Milken summit rival has unique ties to famed ‘Junk Bond King'
This week's Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills faced a little competition – and it came from someone with an interesting connection to the famed high-profile investment bank that made Michael Milken a Wall Street legend, On The Money has learned. Milken, now a philanthropist and investor, made history by creating the high yield or junk bond market at Drexel Burnham Lambert back in the 1980s. It's where he earned the moniker 'Junk Bond King.' Milken and his team were among the most innovative financiers ever. Their so-called junk bonds, or high-yield debt, were used to finance some of the biggest companies when they were in their formative stages and turn them into corporate behemoths. Advertisement 3 Michael Milken (left) made history by creating the high yield or junk bond market back in the 1980s. It's where he earned the moniker 'Junk Bond King.' Adam Winnick has been quietly making a name for himself in crypto as an investor. Jack Forbes / NY Post Design He did have some help along the way. His partner in building Drexel into a powerhouse investment bank was the late Gary Winnick, a former furniture salesman from Roslyn, on Long Island, who moved his family west to work in Drexel's Beverly Hills office and emerged as one of the best junk-bond salesmen in the business. These days, Winnick's son, 49-year-old Adam Winnick, has been quietly making a name for himself in the burgeoning crypto business as an investor and thought leader. He has a competing conference – the Medici Network — also taking place this week, one that is more intimate than the sprawling Milken Global affair but is attracting its own A-list group of influencers looking for investment insights.. Advertisement Panels on the underlying blockchain technology, various new crypto related investments and the changing regulatory environment are all featured a few miles from the Milken summit right in Beverly Hills. Winnick has been hosting the four-day event, which ends Thursday, for the past eight years. It started small but now attracts a couple hundred people, mostly by invite. Full disclosure: I was a panel moderator at Milken, but I also spoke at Medici and can attest to the relevancy of its agenda, particularly as the Trump administration embraces the $3 trillion digital coin business. Winnick is well aware of the optics of running up against his dad's old partner and his own legacy. I knew Gary Winnick well before he died in 2003. He was a street smart salesman who became an entrepreneur in his post-Drexel life. He was a visionary who took chances. Many worked, some didn't. (He was the chairman of the now-defunct Global Crossing) 3 Milken at his namesake conference on Tuesday. REUTERS Advertisement Gary Winnick also never forgot his New York roots even while doing business in the more passive-aggressive environment of LA. People who worked with him recall his blunt, take-no-prisoners style. I can see the old man in Adam as I hung out at Medici between sessions at Milken. He also sees parallels between his old man's line of work and his current calling. Junk bonds aren't controversial these days; they're used seamlessly in corporate financing, but that wasn't always the case. Their controversial nature stemmed from their core utility of helping early stage companies circumvent the big NY banks for financing. 3 Gary Winnick, Milken's former partner, in 2002. REUTERS Advertisement It is why the government took aim at Milken and Drexel, eventually putting the firm out of business and forcing Milken to take a deal where he served jail time for a series of what I would call victimless, non-criminal offenses. Milken, of course, has since remade his life and career as a thought leader and philanthropist. He was pardoned by President Donald Trump during his first term. Adam Winnick points out to me that crypto, like high yield, is often vilified in traditional finance circles, and until recently by securities regulators. 'I actually think crypto is much more hated than junk bonds ever were,' he tells me. 'But digital assets are going to be way bigger than the high yield market ever was.' How does he feel about going up against his dad's old partner and boss with a competing conference? 'It helps to do my event at the same time, but it's total counter programming,' Adam said, before quipping, 'I also serve better food.'
Daily Maverick
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
A new pope is chosen: A look back on the jostling for the papacy and the conclave's history
Becoming pope was a big deal for a cardinal and his family. Leading candidates known as papabili (pope-ables) began strategising and negotiating even before a pontiff died. Cardinal Robert Prevost of the United States is the new pope, succeeding Pope Francis, and taking the name Pope Leo XIV. He's been elected following a millennium-old ceremony known as the papal conclave. During the conclave, the 135 eligible Cardinal Electors of the Catholic Church sequestered themselves and elected the new pope in isolation. During that time, they had no contact with the outside world and they voted repeatedly, in written ballots and verbal declarations, until one of them achieved a two-thirds majority. Every failure brings sighs from the crowds in St. Peter's Square as the votes, burned with a chemical admixture, send up a plume of inky black smoke from the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. White smoke, signalling a new pope has been elected, provokes cheers and celebrations and the beginning of a new papal era, as was the case after the election of Leo on May 8, 2025. The history of the conclave, especially during the Italian Renaissance that I teach and research, tells us a lot about how the papacy is both a religious and a political office. The pope is at once the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church as well as the absolute monarch of Vatican City. He is both bishop of Rome and head of state of the smallest sovereign state in the world. Politics of the papacy In the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, the Vatican was the capital of a much-larger Papal State. This territorial buffer around Rome at its height bordered the territories of Florence, Naples, Milan and Venice, and covered much of northern Italy. Popes wielded great influence in the dramatic politics of famous Italian families like the Medici: it was a Medici pope, Clement VII, who helped negotiate the installation of the first Medici duke in Florence. Apocryphal accounts persist of Julius II, the so-called 'Warrior Pope,' leading a charge over the walls of Bologna in 1506. At the same time popes, and Catholic policy, had profound consequences for European and global politics: Clement's successor Paul III excommunicated England's King Henry VIII, cementing the English break with Rome in 1538. Alexander VI was more audaciously imperial: he sponsored the treaty that arbitrarily divided the entire world outside of Europe between Spain (his home country) and Portugal in 1494. Alexander VI's historical infamy is perhaps outdone only by his son, Cesare Borgia, made famous by his mention is Niccolo Machiavelli's book The Prince. Becoming pope was a big deal for a cardinal and his family. Leading candidates known as papabili (pope-ables) began strategising and negotiating even before popes died. When a pontiff died, those cardinals abroad began their travels to Rome, construction began on the temporary cells that would house them all during the sequestration and the real work of electing a pope began. Enea Silvio Piccolomini left a detailed memoir of his election as Pius II in 1458. In it, he describes a process of negotiating, threatening, cajoling and strategising that makes the scheming in the recent movie Conclave look unsophisticated. Renaissance Italy wrestled with and ultimately reconciled itself to the political nature of the papacy. Many, including popes such as Pius II, expressed discomfort with the political power of the papacy. While it was a clear factor in the schism of European Christendom that led to the emergence of the Protestant churches in the 16th century, in early modern Italy the political power of the papacy was a reality of the diplomatic milieu. The empty throne The conclave marks a special place in early modern history as a time when the ordinary political order was overturned for a brief period known as the sede vacante (the Vacant See). The Vacant See was a time when identities were swappable and when, as one Paolo di Grassi told a judge in 1559, 'in Vacant See [Romans] are the masters. The People are the Masters.' Di Grassi had, during the Vacant See of November 1559, pursued his own longstanding grudges against his enemies and been involved in at least one armed brawl. While they waited for a new pope, Romans and everyone else might have passed the time with another favourite vice: gambling on the conclave's outcome. European princes and other potentates of the church paid close attention to conclaves, tried to smuggle information in and out and steer the conclave in favour of their preferred candidate. In 1730, for instance, Cardinal Lambertini smuggled a letter out of his conclave thanking a benefactor for their donations to his future ordination as Pope Benedict XIV. The election held everyone's attention as a rare and unusually impactful event in the Roman calendar. While Rome's streets thrummed with tension during the chaotic days of a Vacant See, the conclave proceeded serenely and secretly within the Vatican's walls. The use of white smoke to mark the election of a pope only began in the 20th century. During the Renaissance, the sound of bells would be a more effective way to spread the news through Rome, before the new pope was announced to the city and the world. Much turns on that announcement now, as much did in previous centuries. The conclave elects both a pope and a head of state. While Vatican City is magnitudes smaller than the Papal State of the past, it remains a sovereign state. Papal pronouncements shape not just religious thought but political action, through voting, advocacy and more. The crowds who awaited the announcement of the new pope might be less raucous than Renaissance Romans, but they were nonetheless invested in the results. DM
